Playing Games: adultswim, neopets and Black & White

After my small look into the current market and the tech' I have to work with, I thought now would probably be the best time to sit down and play a few games with similarities to the game I want to design.
I want my game to be a virtual pet game for mid-teens to late twenties males. My game will have a lot of dark humour and a bizzare and indie comic book-esque visual style. With this in mind, I thought a good place to start looking would be the games section of the adultswim website. adultswim games are a bizzare array of tastelessly offensive, weird, twisted and yet surprisingly well designed flash games. Needless to say, I had a hell of a time playing them.
The adultswim flash games are small in size and simple. They are exactly the sort of games you would find in the iPhone, tastlessness aside. The game I had the most fun with, was Robot Unicorn Attack.

A Screenshot of Robot Unicorn Attack from adultswim.com/game.

Although not fantastically relevant to my own endevour, I found it incredibly addictive and certainly worth learning a few tricks from. The aim of the game is to keep the robot unicorn alive for as long as possible while he runs at increasing speed through a world of fairies and rainbows. The player can make the robot unicorn jump to get across ravines, or "rainbow dash" to get through obstacles. The game give you three lives, or "wishes" as they are called in the game, to rack up as high a score as you can. The game is infinite and randomly generated, constantly increasing in speed until you die.
The game uses repitition, very simple controls and a lot of flashing colours to make the game almost trance inducing; sucking you into a mode where your relexes act before your brain has a chance to figure out what just happened, in a way that only games like Tetris have done before.
Although this isn't much good for the virtual pet mode of my game, it is certainly useful for the "Rampage-esque" part of the game, where the player gets a chance to test out their pet nasty on a city. I could easily make the game much faster paced and much more "pick-up and play" by making the player move at constant speed and then adding some very simple controls for smashing buildings and eating people. I also like the idea of increasing the score the longer the player stays alive. A lot more research needs to be done, but I believe, just by playing Robot Unicorn Attack, I am a lot closer to my rampage mode.

The next game I looked on adultswim was much more relevant to the virtual pet area of my game. The game is called My Lil' Bastard. Although, in reality, it is much more of a puzzle game, it is dressed up as a virtual pet game. The goal is to figure out, with the items available to you, how to take care of the little fellow. For instance, near the beginning of the game, you are told to toilet train your pet. No other clues are given and all you have at your disposal, isn't required for feeding, cleaning or entertaining your pet, is a water spray bottle. After some experimentation I figure that if I sprayed him with water every time he tried to poo, he would, eventually, head over to the toilet and give it a go. Unfortunatly, the incredibly unhygenic, poo covered, starving, depressed mess that was my pet died every time I stopped feeding him, cleaning him, entertaing him or replacing things he decided would be fun to set on fire.

My Lil' Bastard by adultswim Games.

The game is deliberatly designed to be frustrating and is a good pointer as to how not to design my game. It gives the player far too much to think about at once and overwhelms them with the urge to poison their pet (which is an actual option). I do not want the player to feel this about the pet I provide for them. I want them to be able to pick it up and put it down on a whim and not have to feel like they are obliged to stress about it. This just leads to the player despising the pet, and getting frustrated with the game.

After adultswim I decided to google virtual pets and see what I could find online. Apart from the usual browser based rubbish with no real consideration to design apart from the principal of making it bright and shiny enough to convince small children to steal their parent's credit cards, I found Neopets. Although Neopets is morally no better than the other afore mentioned browser based pet games, it does seem to be the most popular. It also seems to attract a wider audience than their intended demographic, as proven by several people I know in their early twenties who still play this game. The idea of the game is to create your own pet out of a very limited selection of species and colours and then play games, trade goods and put your pet up against each other to take part in the game's living , breathing economy to buy your pet clothes, furtinure and accessories. The unfortunate thing is that you can also pay real money to buy things, which is an extremly bad design choice. This makes players feel like they are being treated unfairly and that losing an auction or not being able to afford a rare item that quickly dissappears to another, richer buyer, is not their fault. The game also limits how much money you can make from playing games in a day.

My Neopet Pomplomph.

The game puts very little emphasis on actually feeding your pet in any meaningful sense. Although you do have to feed it every week or so to stop the pound coming to take it away. Most of the game's emphasis is put on the economy. Every turn you take you will constantly be told that you could do something better if you buy this or buy that. The game's popularity seems to be due to it's extremely bright and colourful visual design and the sheer variety of things to do. Most of the flash mini-games on the site are mediocre at best, but there are a lot of them.
If all the best of the browser-based virtual pet games has to offer is a mini-economy aimed at small children with cutesy designs and medicore flash games, then I needed to look somewhere else. I decided to look into an old gem by Lionhead Studios, Black & White.

Black & White is a God Game which puts you in charge of a small civilisation of people as their deity. In the world of Black & White each god is given a creature. The player is given a choice of three different creatures at the beginning, a cow, an ape or a tiger. The creature is huge relative the the tiny people you watch over and continues to grow as the game progresses. Following the games theme on black and white morality, the creature can be trained via a punishment or reward system which consists of stroking the creature, or violently striking it. Most of the time the creature has the ability to roam around the world as it pleases, perform random acts based on it's current needs, waiting for you to tell it if it is right or wrong. For instance, the creature gets hungry and sees a person. The creature then eats the person. A this point, as the creatures owner, it is your choice to decide wether or not to punish it. Ironically, this means that making a peaceful and loving creature, requires much more violence from you. The creature will also change appearance based upon how you treat the creature. Which means you end up with a brutal, mindless war machine with matted black fur and glowing red eyes, or a peaceloving and productive pet which shines with golden light as it skips gaily through flowery meadows.

My creature in Black & White

 

I love the dynamic punishment and reward system. This could be easily intergrated into the iPhone's touch technology, especially when stroking or striking your monster. However, I would much rather think of a different punishment and reward system, hopefully one which is much more dynamic. I feel like the reward and punishment system needs to be unique to my game as it will, most likely play a big part.
I think that the freeroaming ability only worked in Black & White because of the game having a much bigger structure beyond the creature. If the creature were the focal point, it would be much harder to use this system without the players getting bored of having to follow the creature around. I think it could be a good idea to have a small 2D environment, like in My Lil' Bastard with which the Monster can freely roam around in, interacting with objects. I also like the idea of morph, but the idea of good and evil morphs seem pointless when the point of the game is to create a vicious killing machine. Perhaps have the parts of the monster that it use most become bigger or more exaggerated.

I think, after this research, I can begin to look at research for visual design, before finally putting together a rough draft of the design itself.