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Overview
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“Reinvent the Wheel” is a casual game made for the 2017 Github Game Off, a month-long game jam hosted by Github and itch.io. Put together in Unity with a small group of students from the Video Game Development Association at California State University, Long Beach, for PC and Mobile Platforms. The player is asked to fashion a “wheel” from a misshapen boulder within a small window of time. Once the time is up, their “wheel” is rolled down a hill, it’s final resting point representing the player’s score.
As the sole game designer, I designed the original concept of the game, including the rules, controls, and the overall gameplay and user experience. Following the months post-release, I continued to shape the feel of the game through monitored play-test sessions and conceptualized additional game modes to further expand the use of the rock-chiseling mechanic. |
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Role: Game Designer
Organization: Monument Games
Tools: Unity, C#, GitHub
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Simplicity & Understanding
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As this game was being developed part-time for a month-long game jam, a small scope was crucial if we were to submit a finished game by the deadline. This meant a game with minimal controls, rules, and gameplay loop. Ideally, we also wanted a game that could port fairly easily to mobile devices. For inspiration, I had turned to the small loop but high replay value of flash games from the early 2000's, including games like Kitten Cannon.
What had resulted was a control scheme that was heavily reliant on mouse usage, which ported very well to mobile devices. Player control was locked into a circular track surrounding the boulder, and their only other interaction aside from mouse movement was left clicking, which could either be clicked rapidly or held down to create a larger chip in the boulder. |
Actual screenshot from game pitch document.
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Early prototype of control scheme by Ruben Sanchez.
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What may have been the most important design principal during development, however, was that the game should be understood at a glance, with little to no additional instructions on how to play. As this was a game grounded in commonly understood physics principles (round rock travels faster downhill), it was easy for anyone to pick up and play.
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Replay Value
While a small scope was key to getting a completed game submitted in time for the jam, it was just as important to us that players would want to continue playing the game after picking it up for the first time. In this case, the go-to answer was a standard leader board that would keep track of the furthest distances that players were able to travel. This leader board, however, was stored locally rather than online; partially to keep scope down for the jam, but also in hopes that a local scoreboard would help cultivate a competitive yet playful environment, should 2 friends be playing together in person. This was also inspired by the flash games of the early 2000's, as it was not uncommon for friends to play these games together in person, taking turns in an effort to beat each other's high score.
In order to keep gameplay as fair as possible between players, we implemented a solution to introduce an element of randomness into each play session. The boulders that are present to the player at the start of each game loop are chosen at random from an array of pre-made boulders, and then rotated to a random degree. This was an effort to prevent players from relying on muscle memory to make ideal shapes, but it served the additional purpose of preventing the player from ever creating the same boulder twice.
Humor
The final design pillar for this project was to incorporate some amount of humor and charm into the experience. What this would look like in-game was unclear when the concept was pitched, but the original idea of the game was sparked by the work of Gary Larson and his "Far Side" comics. He would often modernize the every-day situations of cavemen in his comics, or play off of their lack of knowledge to create charmingly funny situations. Although our game was strongly influenced by the dynamic that flash games were known for, they were often more raunchy or adult in nature. Reflecting the comedic style of Larson offered an opportunity to make the charm and humor of the game as far-reaching as possible, without alienating players who might take offense at some more mature or crude forms of humor.
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Player scores "getting crushed".
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Keeping the door open to humorous elements during the development gave birth to perhaps one of the most important concepts in the game: personifying the leader board scores. By placing individual cave people in the way of the boulder as it rolls, the player becomes actively engaged in the more passive phase of the game, when they no longer have a direct way of interacting with the boulder. Seeing a rival player's score being crushed by the boulder not only added a profound sense of satisfaction, but also built up suspense when the boulder would begin to slow, and the certainty of beating the next score became ambiguous.
As an added bonus, establishing the game's charm and humor allowed us to add in our own secrets and "easter-eggs" for the players to find. Unfortunately, you'll have to play the game yourself in order to find them!
As an added bonus, establishing the game's charm and humor allowed us to add in our own secrets and "easter-eggs" for the players to find. Unfortunately, you'll have to play the game yourself in order to find them!
Legend has it that Tim Schafer himself has played the game,
and that he may have even chuckled at it.
Click to view full design docs.
