Mouse Gym / Game-a-Week #2 Postmortem

Hey y'all! trying to document my thoughts each week as I do Firepit's Game-A-Week jams. This week's theme was 'ritual', a super engaging jam theme that i've worked with a couple times! The gist of ritual is something played ritualistically. In 2019, the project I made for a 'ritual' game a week was Belle the Cat Bot Belle the cat bot is a tomagotchi-like virtual pet that lives in your twitter feed. my initial intent with it was that you would interact with one of belle's tweets once, and she would later whine that you weren't around, forcing you to come back every couple of days to interact with her. Due to scope issues (and Twitter ToS issues, the bot repeatedly gets out of commission after being taken down as spam), Belle wouldn't remember you, but would respond to you when you liked or retweeted. 

Another project made for an assignment similar to 'ritual' (the exact theme was 'asymmetric'), TEXTRIS was a game I made with some friends at school that lived in a discord channel. It was a tetris clone, with the twist that you are unable to drop any of the pieces, and have to wait for them to fall very, very slowly. I initially set off the week with the hopes I would make another social media bot, and possibly iterate on TEXTRIS. The problem was, I couldn't figure out a good improvement on it. A design issue I ran into with TEXTRIS was that players were initially very interested and committed, but after solving a few tetris problems or fixing a mistake, players lost interest. The solution was not to ramp up the speed, because that would only demand more attention. I think the type of problems needed some variety. An initial theme I considered was having to keep a candle or flame lit on a discord channel. I also considered having some competitive nature to it, but never ended up figuring out a way to have something long-form and competitive without being boring. 




I settled on taking inspiration from my favorite game of 2021, NERTS! Online. My favorite part in the game is its interaction between players through cursors. When playing it for the first time, I was extremely surprised how fun it felt just having multiple cursors on screen. In between game rounds, my friends and I would play small games with the cursors, circling each other, forming a line, holding hands, etc. I thought that it was a fun enough concept to try out on its own. Theme wise I wanted to do some sort of school playground or gym, both because it was a fun hangout space, and also a ritual I miss from when I was younger. Here's how it turned out!

Some thoughts: 

-I think I focused too much on having the perspective look cool with the mouse cursors. I'm definitely happy with how it turned out visually, but in focusing on that I definitely sacrificed some playability. 

-I think I might've missed out on what was fun in NERTS! by adding the dodgeball "mechanic". Like i might have overdesigned it? The joy in nerts was having your everyday mouse application turn into some playground in itself. I think maybe focusing on a "click to flip your cursor direction" mouse expression mightve given me what I was looking for. 

-I standby the decision not to have any formal game logic in this one. It's a hangout space, and I wanted people to figure play for themselves.
See ya next week!