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Step 2A Page on Game Design
So, the opportunity was, in many ways, obvious. Take a familiar control scheme that appealed to people, and a genre of game people already understood, and make it something better than it was by making it less literal, and more fantastic.
By this point, we had a playable ball-rolling tech-demo up and running. It was awesomely un-pretty, but allowed us to make sure the core controls worked properly. Still, we had no setting, and at this point, little idea of what you'd actually *do* rolling the ball around.
There are a lot of possible settings for a game. Space, the future, the past, micro-scale environments, universe-spanning whatchamajigs... your only real limitation is your imagination. But that doesn't mean some settings aren't better than others.
If I tell you, for instance, that you'll be rolling a ball on asphalt, then you go from asphalt to grass, you can already imagine, without any additional information, how the ball will behave. If, on the other hand, I tell you that you'll be rolling on a surface made up of the Essence of Human Suffering, then transition to another surface made up of the tiny legs of the billion residents of the Floogleblornax Zone of the distant Galaxy Z-15 Beta, I have to go into a complex discussion of what the surface friction generated by Human Suffering is, and how the legs of those billion residents are lubricated by a silicon-based sweat induced by their transition from Z-15 Beta to our Solar System, and so that's why you speed up when you go from suffering to blornax. Obviously.
It's a giant mess. While videogames allow you to really go beyond what's physically capable in reality, that doesn't mean that you always should. Being able to leverage what people already know can make things a lot more accessible.
So, we wanted a familiar, understandable setting, but not something like your generic wooden box. We also needed something that you'd actually be *doing* other than pointlessly rolling toward your arbitrary destination.
There are times when you have to try a bunch of different concepts, have a bunch of false starts, and iterate a lot before finding an appropriate mix of setting and gameplay. A previous project I worked on spent a whole year on this process, and we figured it out only towards the end of that first year - then was canceled several months later. Taxiball, on the other hand, came together in about five minutes.
The exchange went something like this:
"How 'bout a city?"
"Ooh! Taxi - you can pick up people, roll them to their destination."
"A Taxi-ball?"
"Taxiball!"
I'd like to say it was more difficult than that, but it wasn't - everyone on the team almost instantly understood what the basic jist of the game would be. Pick up and drop off fares as fast as possible before the clock runs out to earn as much money as you can.
And to this point, little thought had been given to the audio. Our only real thought was, "Hey, we know a guy..."
By this point, we had a playable ball-rolling tech-demo up and running. It was awesomely un-pretty, but allowed us to make sure the core controls worked properly. Still, we had no setting, and at this point, little idea of what you'd actually *do* rolling the ball around.
There are a lot of possible settings for a game. Space, the future, the past, micro-scale environments, universe-spanning whatchamajigs... your only real limitation is your imagination. But that doesn't mean some settings aren't better than others.
If I tell you, for instance, that you'll be rolling a ball on asphalt, then you go from asphalt to grass, you can already imagine, without any additional information, how the ball will behave. If, on the other hand, I tell you that you'll be rolling on a surface made up of the Essence of Human Suffering, then transition to another surface made up of the tiny legs of the billion residents of the Floogleblornax Zone of the distant Galaxy Z-15 Beta, I have to go into a complex discussion of what the surface friction generated by Human Suffering is, and how the legs of those billion residents are lubricated by a silicon-based sweat induced by their transition from Z-15 Beta to our Solar System, and so that's why you speed up when you go from suffering to blornax. Obviously.
It's a giant mess. While videogames allow you to really go beyond what's physically capable in reality, that doesn't mean that you always should. Being able to leverage what people already know can make things a lot more accessible.
So, we wanted a familiar, understandable setting, but not something like your generic wooden box. We also needed something that you'd actually be *doing* other than pointlessly rolling toward your arbitrary destination.
There are times when you have to try a bunch of different concepts, have a bunch of false starts, and iterate a lot before finding an appropriate mix of setting and gameplay. A previous project I worked on spent a whole year on this process, and we figured it out only towards the end of that first year - then was canceled several months later. Taxiball, on the other hand, came together in about five minutes.
The exchange went something like this:
"How 'bout a city?"
"Ooh! Taxi - you can pick up people, roll them to their destination."
"A Taxi-ball?"
"Taxiball!"
I'd like to say it was more difficult than that, but it wasn't - everyone on the team almost instantly understood what the basic jist of the game would be. Pick up and drop off fares as fast as possible before the clock runs out to earn as much money as you can.
And to this point, little thought had been given to the audio. Our only real thought was, "Hey, we know a guy..."
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