Math-Sticks: Figuring out gameplay
Dearest gentle reader, when we last spoke, I told you I was making a new game and while I had a good idea of the shape of it, I was totally lost on its soul.
Well, in a bout of late night inspiration that struck during my daughter’s bedtime routine, I think I have a pretty good idea for gameplay that’s fun, easy and has just enough jeopardy to be exciting.
Mechanics & Gameplay
The core idea of the game is updating a seven segment display by moving one segment at a time. There are three blocks in the display. Valid responses are limited to digits only, one per block.
Here’s the gameplay I’ve come up with:
- Game starts with a random number from 1 to 999
- We left pad the generated number with zeros so that we always have three digits. So, 99 becomes 099, 2 becomes 002, 846 stays as it is.
- The player needs to move the segments around to form a new number.
- They can move three segments at most but must move at least one.
- A round is won when a valid number is submitted.
- Every round must be won with a unique number. In other words, once a number has been submitted it cannot be submitted again.
- Each round that is won adds the submitted number to the player’s score which starts from zero. The initially generated random number is not counted towards the score.
- Each round has a 45 second timer. Apart from submitting a unique number a round can also end when the timer runs out. The game ends at this point with the sum of the player’s numbers and number of rounds lasted used as the score.
- High scores are saved and displayed.
From the initial feel of this, I think it’s a really good game. It’s the kind of game where there’s no winning, only deferring losing for as long as possible. Which is quite nice, but I didn’t have what felt like a natural stop condition and so I’ve brute forced it by using a resetting timer. Hopefully the timer is long enough that it only triggers when one feels they have no moves to play anyway.
It’s also a game that doesn’t need keyboard input which I’ve really struggled with on my other games especially on mobile where there is really limited screen real estate.
Onboarding
Another problem I’ve encountered in my other games is people not immediately understanding how to play them. In Lockpick, I tried to have a “How to play” modal that explained the rules. In 8Words, I had a block of bullet points just below the play button. I found that neither of those really worked.
So, taking a cue from 2048, one of my game-making inspirations, I’ve decided to add a tutorial mode. I think that will land much better, especially as the narrative technique “show don’t tell” espouses and what is a game if not a narrative?
Conclusion
That’s the game, more or less ready to play. I hope you enjoy it. https://mathsticks.co