Week 2: UP/DOWN - One Button Game

Up/Down is a game where a ball runs on two tracks either at the top or at the bottom. The player is expected to avoid obstacles on both surfaces to play successfully.

The Concept

• A simple sphere ball will be moving from the left to the right part of your screen. In essence, the ball will be kept more than halfway away from the right end.
• The screen displays a ceiling and a floor platform as it will be shown later.
• There will be obstacles laid on both platforms. You should be able to avoid these obstacles for as long as you can.

Why?

• The reason why you should play this game is it gets more and more challenging as you progress with your score. The game sufficiently tests your reflex action. It also involves some physics-related concepts.

Audience

• This game can be played by anyone regardless of age. It is helpful for everyone to also understand some physics-related concepts such as projectile motion and friction without officially learning physics classes.

The Rules

• This game is “simple” to play. The ball which represents you will be moving to the left side of the screen.
• When you encounter obstacles, use the space button on the keyboard to jump to the ceiling or get down to the floor. Simple to interact with, right?

Gameplay

Setting

The game background will be bright initially but can change color to dark as it gets more challenging

Challenges

• This game’s challenges can be said to represent the complications you face as you get experienced to many things around you.
• The game tests the player’s ability to quickly respond to the obstacles and how intuitively they could apply physics laws without actually knowing the formal statements.

Features

• There will be boost features such as fast forward, slow down and more. They will not be always important to use. These will help the player make smart decisions and realize not every boost is good.
• The ball will be going faster as you progress in the game. There are no distinct levels but a single level which gets more challenging with time.
• The surfaces will sometimes be slippery or rough and the ball will “behave” according to the laws of friction. This feature is a simple but important demonstration of friction and its impact.
• The obstacles will vary in size. When you decide to jump, you should be conscious of the trajectory of the ball. Precision is a key in this game.
• There will be checkpoints which allow the player to resume playing from that part until the number of lives is 0. Restarting will cause the game to start from the beginning. This keeps the player from avoiding the game after few trials.

Mechanics

• The player is expected to adapt to the progress of the game and be precise about the position where they choose to jump or come down.

Internal Economy

• The player will have at most 3 “lives”. With every failure, a life gets reduced. The player can boost their number of lives as they earn the life boost feature. The player will be motivated to keep playing and understand that every obstacle can be overcome.

Game Balance

Positive feedback

• The boosts and multiple life features keep the player playing the game.
• The game is a challenging “puzzle” that could be played by anyone.

Negative feedback

• The challenges can sometimes get frustrating especially when the difficulty increases.
• The color choices matter for colorblind players. This could be avoided by deep research

Adjusting the game’s difficulty

• The checkpoints are points where the game indicates increasing difficulty.

Victory and Defeat Conditions

• There is no end to the game. However, the player will be challenged with many obstacles. The high score feature serves as an indication to how far the player progressed with the difficulty

Storyboards + Interface Design

• Figure 1 shows a general sample of the look. The change in difficulty is detailed in figure 2.

Figure 1. A sample look of the initial part of the game. It is shown selectively here but will be adjusted as necessary in the actual game.

Figure 2. The first picture shows a simple step of passing a block obstacle. As the second picture shows, after the ball has run for a while, more difficult challenges with spiky and large obstacles occur. The surface characteristics also change

• The interface will have a good contrast to isolate the ball from the obstacles. There will be “Lives: ” and “Score:” labels on top of screen. It is easy to understand and interact with.

Here is a simple demo of how the game works. The demo confirms the positions by printing it out on the top left part of the screen.

Figure 3. Blueprint of the program that prints out the position of the ball

Figure 4. Alternating responses when the SPACE key is pressed. Since the ball jumps up to the ceiling at the start, you can see the ‘At top’ display. After that the positions alternate with every SPACE key pressed.

On market, there are not many games of this sort. The buttons are used to jump instead of changing surface. Although these by themselves might be challenging, the two surface game is more interesting as players need to think of both surfaces to play.

Having a game that is really challenging at some point such that a perfect precision is expected would draw more attention to this game. The educational contents can also be used to market the game to parents. Although there will be a free version of it, having in-app purchases such as for hints in the more difficult stages of the game can help in acquiring money.