Friend Machine / Game-A-Week #(3? 4?) postmortem!

Hi friends! I'm back this week after a partial break last week (caught a cold in the last few days and delayed finishing my game til next week!)
this weeks theme was CARE, something initially a challenge to me. None of my games tend to be super personal, and I wanted to try tackling it head on (i didnt! lol). I really liked the idea of caring for someone else by playing a game for them. I tossed around the idea of imagining a game that jumbled people's wordle caches, leaving you in charge of someone else's streak for a week. I really liked that idea but wanted something a less stressful.

I ended up on this "care for someone else by playing": what if you made a character FOR someone else in like a picrew or something?  I also had Brin and Ash's Radio Bubble on my mind from two weeks ago, that distributed message among players.  Maybe i could set up a server or something to hold people's requests for characters and images of completed ones? Obviously, way out of scope, i quickly abandoned that idea after starting the character creator itself. Turns out making a character is in itself an act of care! And i'd already had some experience making character creators, and really liked doing it. ALSO: Ive had this INCREDIBLE character creator game on my mind for a few weeks now.
 If you haven't, please please play it. 

I'd been really happy with my bleebo game in terms of art direction, and set out to achieve something similar. I still wanted to play with the physicality of interface, so I wanted to focus on making it a controller game, with controller inputs mapped to physical weird inputs. my dream would be to make a physical controller like the one I made for this game  someday.

Main Inspo I went off of: 


I'm a big fan of buttons on cassette decks, and they way they feel when you push them. Took a few images like this from CARI's"cassette futurism" channel and "Wacky Pomo" channel,  and also grabbed some images of things I want to represent weird input: bathroom faucets, lamp pull-strings, a cleaner spray bottle, a rotary phone, etc. 

As far as mapping goes, some of the mapping felt really organic, but I ran into a problem: you only have two joysticks, and you can make a LOT of fun input from them. How do you switch it up? I was inspired by supercore's TV Trouble, where you have to hold some buttons as well as do stick input to turn knobs. 

Things came together pretty quickly! I used some straightforward mesh vertex manipulation to change some edge loops on a cube. Just being able to turn off/on directional axis and move the corresponding vertices gave enough variation for me to be happy with it! I did struggle on finding a good staging for the game, because the controller contraption was pretty boxy, and I wanted space to show the character you were making. I ended up going for the aspect ratio for the Nintendo DS (partially inspired by moochi's DS game), with the contraption taking up the bottom screen and the character/background taking up the top. I think this worked well! I kind of want to make it a DS game, with all of the ways you can use your stylus to interact with the controller. 

Moving on, I ended up spending way too much time trying to figure out how to automatically calculate different positions the eyeballs could spawn in.  I also couldn't resist adding a kiki/bouba switch based on waporwave making a comparison to it after seeing a work in progress gif, even if it kind of messes up how the mesh works (you still can't save changes going from one mode to the other and back).

I did really want to put effort into the way the eyes looked. I feel they're a necessary part of any wacky absurdist art style. I lazily took a photo of my own eyeball to turn into a texture:

 

After watching people try it out at the end of the week, I went back and added some juice/features to better help the players figure out what's happening! I wanted to straddle the line of "mysterious enough so you have to experiment the controls and figure what's going on" and "comprehendible enough that you don't get frustrated and spam the buttons" I made some visual aids on the device to highlight which axes you have turned on and which edge loops of the cube you're manipulating! 

All in all I really enjoyed making this project, Of all projects so far this is the one I most want to continue developing. We'll see!

See ya for next week's game!