DETAILS
Genre: Hypercasual
Format: Single Player
Platform: iOS, Android
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DESIGN TENETS
* Mindless
* Endless
* Satirical
The intention behind this game was to make a humorous and simple game that can be played endlessly without much attention required.
The title has both plenty and little to do with the game as it is a satirical take on the mass influx of content creation on social media, in which users are constantly capturing as much of their lives as possible to push in front of the world; often finding niche or repetition in their posts to maximize their audiences' engagement. Aside from the "screen capturing" modality of the game in which users are required to draw a rectangle on the screen to collect the onslaught of cubes, the gameplay itself makes no notion or mention to content creation or social media. What is referred to, to a great deal in fact, is the essence of this very phenomenon.
The cubes are endless with no condition to be satisfied to "end" the game other than the player simply not playing or explicitly giving up. The cubes themselves are of random colors and speeds, with the player's only task to capture as many cubes of the same color in a single rectangle. If there are no cubes collected, or the cubes are of different colors, the player is punished not with a game over, but with a score of 0; where they must indeed, start again.
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GAMEPLAY HIGHLIGHTS
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GAMEPLAY HIGHLIGHT: NO GAMEOVER
Design tenets: mindless, endless, satirical.
A traditional cycle in an arcade game is that the player plays until they reach a game over condition, and then their score is measured against others. This game; however, is endless: the game over condition is when a player explicitly opts to stop the game, whether they have a high score or not.
There is in fact a "failure" condition, in which players either capture no cubes at all within a rectangle, or that they cubes they capture are of different colors; but this does not end the game, it simply restarts their score to 0.
Yes, players of traditional games "start over" when they reach a game over state and they elect to "play again." Yes, players of this game can choose to end their game when they *think* they have a high score (that is of course, they know or remember the high score reached on this device). But the game is much more psychological and much more simpler than that, it will never present you with these game events or information. This feeds into the endless and mindless nature of the game in which you just... play.
After all, how do you "quit while your ahead" if you don't know? Or even if you do, why don't you just keep playing just a little bit longer, because you know you can "get a little bit further." :)
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GAMEPLAY HIGHLIGHT: SCREEN CAPTURE
Design tenets: mindless, endless, satirical.
The core mechanic of the game is drawing a rectangle around the rushing cubes in order to capture them. That's it. But that means it needs to feel intuitive, rewarding, and reliable.
The common input modality is to drag your finger across the screen: so, it is definitely used here with no frills or new spins; the rectangle is also drawn in real time and it not released until your finger is released, providing the player with affirmative input feedback. There is an extensive buffer for capturing cubes in that there needs to be an arbitrarily sufficient amount of the cube visible within the rectangle to be considered captured. The rectangle also lingers and presents itself to the screen, showing the cubes that were just captured by the player so that they may not second guess or doubt what they had or hadn't just collected (even if technically within the rectangle, if the cube is not "substantially" present, it is omitted from the screen capture afterimage).
Additionally, the actual rectangle itself maintains a color; either black or that of the last group of *like* cubes collected. If players just captured a group of all purple cubes, the next rectangle will be purple, providing the player with a boost if they capture a group of like purple cubes again. They of course can still capture a group of only tan cubes without penalty, but they will not receive the bonus multiplier of points. What do those social media gurus say? "Consistency is key?" :)
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GAMEPLAY HIGHLIGHT: PROGRESSION
Design tenets: mindless, endless, satirical.
It is still an arcade game and players must be presented with an increasing challenge, after all, just because this game is mindless and everlasting, does not to mean it does not need to be fun.
The progression pattern is simple, there is a new random color of cube generated that starts rushing by the player. Then the maximum and minimum speeds of all the cubes increase. Then the cube start moving across the screen at an increased possible angle. And then... it repeats... again and again.
The progression threshold for the score is fairly large, and the progression itself is subtle and segmented in this way to keep the gameplay fluid and to keep the player from being overwhelmed with such an increase of difficulty too fast. But the progression is still there and the relentless increase of difficulty will only further weigh on the player eventually. The progression, because it is random but procedurally, can go on forever, as ever long as it takes the player to break. :)
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ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS
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ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHT: SAVE SYSTEM
The barebones nature of this games means that there are no major important technical feats here, so I decided to highlight something simple but often overlooked: saving. The only data to be saved is whether or not the user prefers the sound to be on or off, and the high score. Booleans and integers are primitive value types so binary serialization is simple and saved directly to the device. Even though this game does not communicate remotely in any way, due to the safety warnings rom Microsoft about the BinaryFormatter, this game uses JSON serialization instead of binary serialization for the data.
ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHT: NO GAME SERVICES
:)
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