A few days ago we (myself and the nice people over at King.com) published my latest game : Perpetual Motion. This new game has much in common with my first physics based game : Wheel of Death. In Wheel Of Death you had to arrange props to get the wheel to the goal. Walls, bus and various other obstacles provided variety to the levels. Box2D was used as the physics engine to allow some realistic collision and physics. While I was developing Wheel Of Death I regularly found I was more interested in building perpetual machines with the available props than I was in completing the levels. By perpetual machines I mean a combination of props that cause the wheel to cycle for an indefinite period. It seemed to me at the time that it would be simple enough to "quickly" build this new game as it used much of the engine from the original. To be honest much of the engine from Wheel of Death remains unchanged except for a few enhancements to make it more reliable but as I became more interested in the concept I started to invest more time in refining the user experience (dialog transitions, a world map with each location having a unique landmark and a different background) and introducing instructional elements (numbers to show the sequence of prop interaction). Getting a meaningful scoring mechanism was probably one of the biggest challenges and from the comments on Kongregate I don't think I went far enough in explaining the scoring system. Still I feel Perpetual Motion is a real leap forward from my first game. I hope you enjoy playing it.
3 comments:
the points scoring in your game appears fairly arbitrary. At first i thought it was based on revolutions within the time allotted but it seems not.
There isn't anything arbitrary about the points system in Perpetual Motion. There is one basic idea in calculating the bonus score : you get extra points (based on a multiplier) by using the identical prop sequentially. The first level that is dependent on this knowledge is Indonesia and a lot of players get stuck on that level because they've missed that idea. If time allows I'll do a post that documents the scoring in some detail. But that won't change anything. It needs to be clearer in the game (it's mentioned in the help) or the points mechanism needs to be really obvious. It's too late to change this for Perpetual Motion but I'm making it my top priority for my next game.
My goodness I'm about to go nuts on this game! This is one of the most addicting games I've ever played! But I enjoyed it though. hehe!
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