Burrito Bison: A Case Study on Pacing
Infinite side-scrollers, coupled with an e-currency and an abundance of upgradeable skills. A tried and true method for creating a short-term entertaining game.
Upon starting the game, players are greeted with a cute scrolling multipage comic providing backstory and an introduction to the actual gameplay. You’re a Burrito Bison, casually shopping for groceries and minding your own business when a blue hand jumps out of a bag of gummy bears and pulls you in. Welcome to Gummy Land.
Into the sidescroller, your Bison avatar is stretching the elastic bands of the wrestling ring ready to be flung out at high speed. Given a single instruction to press the space key or click on the screen in order to stop the rotating wheel and choose a launch strength. Your Bison is flung out to the right of the screen bouncing up and down on the ground and crushing running blue gummy bears beneath, each bounce decreasing your speed until you sputter to a halt. You’ve earned money for each gummy smashed and have the option to restart or to spend money on upgrades first. As your Bison encounters new elements and terrains, the game goes into a freeze frame with instructions appearing to explain how to use them and interact with them.
The game employs heavy parallax moving each element separately, allowing the background elements to blur and whiz by as you pick up speed and for individual elements to move in their own way. Individual gummies all seem to move as separate pieces creating a chaotic and character filled environment.
The game doesn’t take itself too seriously and doesn’t try terribly hard to make you feel totally immersed. It’s very aware of its own genre and doesn’t try to stray too far. The music and sound effects are your typical annoying flash game sounds that most people tend to mute before too long. The game is confined to a small rectangle in the middle of your screen and doesn’t offer full-screen options despite seemingly having the resolution to do so. When clicking outside of the rectangle, the input isn’t recognized by the game and has no effect, in fact, once your mouse has clicked anywhere on the screen apart from the rectangular game screen, none of the key and mouse inputs are tracked by the game until you click within the game screen again.
Where Burrito Bison shines is in its pacing and simplicity. The game never overreaches its limits and tries to be something that it’s not. The game captures your attention by being so simple and fast-paced, players aren’t capable of reaching or breaking the first wall until significant speed upgrades are acquired. The number of coins required to purchase these integral upgrades is never far enough out of reach for players to lose interest. Just as you start hitting a wall in the game, figuratively, you manage to get the new upgrade which allows you to go further and encounter new challenges and obstacles. The game does a fantastic job of stringing you along just as your attention span begins to wane.
