Rise of the FLAMEBOW!!
I love mechanics in video games. I love all sorts of aspects of video games; graphics, music, sound, etc... But really, my favorite parts are the mechanics. The stuff you, as the player, actually do in the games. What you have to learn, what you have to work around, what you have to master. In my opinion, these things are what make or break games. As such, my goal is to mix, iterate on, and invent mechanics that surprise players and inspire other creators.
Back in October I posted my first blog entry about shaders. Since then, I’ve iterated, created, polished, and scrapped more shaders and various other bits of the game in an effort to make something I think would be worth playing. I thought I’d be finished with the game, or at least in a public beta, by the end of 2022. Looking back now, I’m pretty surprised I was so optimistic about getting it done but it seems to be a pretty common issue with most creators. Shrug.
That’s all to say that the game has come a long way since October. I added save states, a local leaderboard, enhanced the tutorial, iterated (reiterated (re-reiterated)) on the movement, added (and removed) complexity around player energy and point accumulation, and generally broke and had to fix the game several times.
I was running into an issue where I felt like the game had some promise but was missing something. Some sort of “I don’t know what.” One thing I knew that would add some spice is the music playlist, discussed further in a previous blog post. That would make things more interesting but wouldn’t solve a feeling of the gameplay just being a little flat. Through all this trial and error, and much head scratching, I finally figured out what it was missing; a super power.
Super powers are great. That’s why they’re called super. Collecting/activating powers in games is one of the most satisfying things about them. Think about video games that have sweet super powers and how awesome they are to use; Mario with his Star Power, any Final Fantasy Limit Breaks, Ken and Ryu’s fireballs, Elden Ring’s best weapon skills. The list is endless. Call them what you will, and video games WILL call them all sorts of things (abilities, skills, powers, talents, specials…) but the result is the same; cool stuff you can do in the game that makes you feel bad*ss and adds a depth that just isn’t there otherwise.
With that in mind, I started iterating on the idea of a super for my game. I knew it had to incentivize the player to move faster, collect more stuff, finish levels faster, all at the cost of being a bit more reckless. During my iterations on shaders, I came up with the flaming rainbow screenspace shader. I thought I’d use it for something related to secrets in the levels but that didn’t really make a ton of sense mechanically and proved to be pretty bad from an efficiency standpoint. However, as with most experiments, I was able to sort of re-engineer the idea into the visual effect for a new super ability. And, thus, FLAMEBOW mode was born!
There still may be some iterations on it but I’m really happy with its current state as it satisfies a lot of different mechanics for the game:
It acts as a shield, so when you hit an obsticle it will reduce your FLAMEBOW meter before reducing the snake’s length.
The amount of time you stay in FLAMEBOW offsets points lost from time spent in a level.
It’s charged by picking up coins, which makes picking up coins more interesting than just giving you more points.
It looks cool!
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