Ba-Bomb!: Lessons learned (part 4) Puzzle-RPG

Quest mode: the real reason to play Ba-Bomb!

Quest mode allowed me to add in some of the wackiness and character appeal that I had always intended for Ba-Bomb!
One of the biggest challenges with creating the quest mode was figuring out how to design it so that it wouldn't take forever and a day to finish making it.  That meant I needed to limit art assets and game complexity as much as possible, while still keeping a somewhat grand scale.

I started by figuring out a story that could be told in as few drawings as possible.

Pengi's at home enjoying his favorite snack.

Monsters invade and ban Pengi's favorite snack!

It's payback time!

Ok, there's actually a few more drawings than just these 3, but I'm not going to post all of them.

I referenced older 8-bit RPG's to see where they cut corners, as well as figuring out a few tricks of my own.
One of the tricks I used was to only animate Pengi, the enemies are all just a single drawing that get's moved around on screen.  I also recolored a number of enemies to create alternate stronger versions of the same enemy to be used later in the game.

I really wanted the RPG aspect to be secondary to the Puzzle aspect of the game, so I simplified the RPG mechanics as much as I could while still making it feel like a traditional RPG.
One of the ways I achieved this was to get rid of traditional Experience and Magic points.
I replaced Experience points with Gold and replaced Magic with items that could either be purchased or found.

So, to level up, all you'd need to do is go shopping.
At the shop you can buy Attack-up, HP-up, Defense-up, as well as techniques like Counter and Dodge. You can buy various items such as the Anvil to attack enemies or a box of matches to assist you whenever you run out.
My favorite part of the shop is the Advice button.  Advice is always free, and is a mix of useful tips, sarcasm and jokes.

Most RPG's have a small party of adventurers, but I simplified it down to just having Pengi.

The biggest problem that needed to be solved with the 'gold only' single character system was healing.
In a typical RPG, healing can be done through Magic, Items, or Healers.  I replaced all of this with a single item/character: Dr. Piggy.

You can get Dr. Piggy from the shop for free.  The only catch being that Dr. Piggy is a piggybank doctor who needs to get paid to heal you.  This works fine in most instances, except for when you run out of gold.
I solved this by leaving the player with 1 HP after losing a battle, and by having Dr. Piggy offer you first aid if you have 1 HP and less than 50 gold.  So, if you keep getting your butt kicked by monsters and run out of Gold, Dr. Piggy can get you back in the game.

Random encounters also exist in the game, but are far less common then in most RPG's.

In Quest mode, you walk along paths until you encounter a monster icon.  Touch the monster icon, and you will enter into a battle.  Win the battle and the monster icon will be replaced by a red circle.  Walking across the red circle has about a 10% chance of a random encounter.  I felt that this system gave you a good deal of control over deciding when to fight, but still enough randomness to keep it interesting.

When in a battle, you start by seeing who your enemy is, as well as stats for both you and the enemy.  The enemy you will face is semi-random, but you will face weaker enemies in the first area, and the strongest enemies in the final area.
Battle difficulty isn't just determined by the enemy's Attack and Defense points, since it's a puzzle game, the number of differently colored bombs will also vary.  In the first area of the game, you will encounter easier stages with fewer bomb colors, and in the later rounds, you will encounter harder stages with more colors and rocks.

In a battle, your goal is to fill the bar on the bottom of the screen by creating the largest combos you can.  When the bar is full, you get your turn to choose to either Attack, Defend, use an Item or Run.
Attack attacks the enemy, Defend increases your defense for several turns, Item allows you to use one of your items, such as Anvil, Matchbook, or Dr. Piggy, and Run attempts to run away from the battle.
If you have purchased the Counter or Dodge techniques, you will have a significantly higher chance of countering or dodging an enemy attack if you select Defend.

Every 4 turns, the enemy will have his chance to attack or use magic.  Not all enemies use magic, but the one's who do will use stronger magic later in the game.  Magic attacks include, but are not limited to: Shuffle - randomizes bomb placement, Summon Skwid - makes Skwid enemy appear, Steal - steals your matches, Anvil - anvil falls on you, Siphon - steals your health, and my favorite: Hail of Stones - which causes stones to fall from the sky and litter the play field.
Sometimes an enemy will spend their turn focusing to build up their magic points if they've used up all their magic.

Of course, the enemies aren't the only ones who have magic.
Though, for Pengi to use magic, he must first find the enchanted Ocarina.
The Ocarina isn't too hard to find, as the shopkeeper gives a couple hints about where to find it.

In the first world of the game, there is a tombstone deep in the woods.  If Pengi has the shovel item, he will dig up the grave and encounter an enemy called "restless bones".  If you defeat this enemy, you will receive the Ocarina.
You can use the Ocarina in a battle, but unless you purchase lessons from the shopkeeper, the Ocarina's magic will backfire on you.
The Ocarina takes a few turns to charge up, and it's effects are random, but at a higher level, they are always useful.
The Ocarina can give you extra matches, extra gold, health, it can clear the screen of stones or duds, it can drop anvils on the enemies or even siphon health from them.
Although the Ocarina's magic is useful, the true purpose of the Ocarina is to unseal the door to the final boss and get the game's good ending.

The real challenge in making the Quest mode wasn't designing the maps or coming up with ideas, the main challenge was properly balancing the game:
Making sure the enemies weren't too strong or weak, balancing the amount of gold received in battle and spent at the shop, balancing the progress bar to ensure you can have a turn just as often as the enemies, etc.  Balancing takes time, and I believe that I balanced this game pretty well, as I spent many many hours testing it to make sure it was well balanced.

Overall, I felt that Quest mode turned out really well.  In the iOS versions of the game, all game modes are unlocked for free, but you only earn a minuscule amount of gold from winning battles until you unlock the full version for $1.  I felt that this was a good strategy, but I never made very many sales.
Next time, I'll share my thoughts on marketing Ba-Bomb!

To be continued...

Ba-Bomb!: Lessons learned (part 3) The making of a sequel

First there was Bombin', a pretty good, completely original puzzle game with a rather poor presentation.

I had a strong love for my game Bombin', but I knew that it was far from perfect.
A little while after completing Bombin', I started developing iOS games at Studio Piña.  I wanted to create a game that would be a hit: one with the mass appeal of a casual puzzle game.  So, I worked on a few ideas until I decided that I would try porting Bombin' to iOS.

Once I worked out how to fit all the important elements onto the iPhone's screen in portrait orientation, I started work on the game design.

The game needed more appeal, so I picked through some old character designs I had done and ended up choosing Pengi, a top hat wearing penguin character I had designed as an enemy for my unfinished game "Powder Keg: the adventures of Little Barrel" which was based on "Dr. Pineapple: Intergalactic Privateer", a comic book that I self-published for 2 issues.

Here's some animations from that unfinished project:

So, now that I had an appealing character for my game, I started on the game design.

The game needed to be more than just a port of Bombin', as that game was a little too simple for what I had in mind.  I wanted this new game to be wild, crazy, totally out there and exciting.  Much akin to the exaggerated western concept of what a Japanese gameshow is like.

What I came up with was a zany experience, Bombin' interspersed with randomness and mini games, the ability to collect 'hens teeth' and exchange them for power-up's, roulette wheels, and other weirdness that did nothing but make the game weird.

As much as I wanted to make that game, I started looking at how many new art assets, extra sound effects, and hours of additional programming would be required, and realized that the scope of this project was beyond what I could handle by myself.  So, I scaled back, and worked on what was the most important: to take Bombin' and make it a better game.

Aside from getting rid of the numbers from the bombs and redoing all of the art, I focussed on making any gameplay improvements that I could.

I added a little randomness to the timing of the exploding bombs to make it a little less mechanical.

I changed the Skwid Blasters punch card to give you a couple more matches when you completed it.

I added the Boulder item, which is a giant stone that takes more hits to destroy.

And I added Brushy, a 'helper' character who sucks the color out of one bomb, then paints every bomb he touches the same color.  This, of course, can help you to create larger combos, or help you out of a jam when you just cant make any groups of 4.

One other small change I made to the game was to drop in a fully charged bomb whenever you cleared a group of less than 4 bombs.  This helps to get the player un-stuck when they can't seem to make any combos large enough to earn them any new matches.

A straight port of Bombin' with a new coat of paint, a few new elements and re-balanced gameplay was a good start, but I wanted the game to be more than just an improved port.  I needed to do something with all those fun ideas I came up with earlier, so I decided to add a couple more game modes:

Aqua, a mode where you blow up bombs to lower the ever rising water level, and Twitch, a mode where you need to be quick to succeed.

These 2 modes were more of an afterthought, because the new game mode that I put the most time into designing and building was Quest mode, a puzzle/rpg hybrid that incorporated some of the original ideas I had for the sequel and allowed me to introduce Pengi the penguin as the game's spokes-character.

To be continued...

Ba-Bomb!: Lessons learned (part 2) The core gameplay

Here's a typical screenshot from Ba-Bomb!

The basic gameplay of Bombin' & Ba-Bomb! is the same: Click on a bomb to make it explode.
Clicking on a bomb uses up one of your matches, which burn out in 10 seconds if you don't click on anything.

Any bombs of the same color that are touching your selected bomb will also explode.
In addition, the explosions will 'heat up' all other bombs that are touching your exploding bombs.
When a bomb heats up enough, it too will explode, creating a chain reaction that can potentially clear a large section of the play field.
In Bombin', the 'heat level' of a bomb is shown by the number on the bomb.  When it's 1 hit away from exploding, you'll see a blinking 4 on the bomb.  In Ba-Bomb!, I improved this by making the bombs grow brighter, larger, and more animated as they heated up, and when they are 1 hit away from exploding, they have their fuse lit and are glowing brightly.
The changes I made to the appearance of the bombs in Ba-Bomb! improved the game dramatically without actually changing any of the gameplay.

So, if you reference the screenshot above, here's what'll happes when you click on the green bomb at the top of the screen on the left of the big blue bomb with it's fuse lit:
The 2 connecting green bombs will explode, igniting the big blue bomb and the smaller blue bomb below it.  This in turn will cause the big yellow bomb to explode, as well as all connected yellow bombs.  That red bomb touching the 2 yellow bombs will get hit twice, causing it to explode as well.  A total of 9 bombs in 1 turn.

So, as you play the game, you use up your matches, but you will earn one more match for blowing up 4 bombs in a turn, 2 matches for blowing up 16 bombs, and 3 matches for blowing up 32 or more bombs in a turn.

To spice up the gameplay, there are a few more things than just bombs that show up in the play field.

Every so often, a huge bomb will show up, this big bomb needs to be hit by 8 explosions before it explodes. When the big bomb explodes, it blows up all bombs that surround it, potentially creating a huge chain reaction.

Aside from the big bomb, there is also Squidley, a bomb eating squid monster.  Squidley jumps from bomb to bomb sucking out the gunpowder and leaving only a useless dud bomb on the playfield.  If you can hit Squidley with 4 explosions, he will explode, blowing up all bombs surrounding him.

When either Squidley or the Big Bomb explode, you will earn an extra punch on a sandwich shop style punch-card.  These punch cards will give you extra points or extra matches when you fill them out.
The punch cards were one of my favorite ideas that I came up with when designing the game, not only are they silly/weird (which is always fun), but they give the player incentive to keep playing.

I mentioned that Squidley leaves behind dud bombs, these duds take 2 hits to remove, and don't heat up any bombs when they explode.  The duds can quickly pile up if you're not careful, making the game a lot harder until you can remove them.

The last of the objects that show up in Bombin' are the stones.  Stones take 3 hits to destroy, and exist only to provide challenge to the game.

The gameplay of Bombin' / Ba-Bomb! is quite good in my opinion (as well as the opinions of virtually everyone who plays it), but in my quest to create a fully original game, I probably alienated a lot of casual players who were expecting 'just another Bejeweled clone'.

That's probably the hardest part of designing a game that's not heavily based on other already popular games; making it simple enough and engaging enough for anyone to become engrossed in the game in just a few seconds.  I think that Bombin' / Ba-Bomb! comes really close to this, but never completely makes sense to the player in the first few seconds (it's just a little too analytical of a game).  Bombin' is especially guilty of this with it's poor graphics and the initial confusion that players encounter when they first see the numbers on the bombs.

To be continued...

Ba-Bomb!: Lessons learned (part 1) Introduction

One of the most highly polished games that I made at Studio Piña is Ba-Bomb!
Ba-Bomb! is the iOS sequel to my earlier Flash game Bombin'

I was incredibly proud of Bombin' when I made it.  I had set out once again to create an original puzzle game that could out-shine Bejeweled.  My previous attempt to out-shine Bejeweled was with my earlier puzzle game "Fusion Rocket".

What I created with Bombin' was a game that I thought was simple to pick up and play, intuitive and fun.  I was close, but didn't quite have that magic million dollar formula.  Though, at the time, I was seeing my game through rose colored glasses of self-satisfaction and couldn't really see the minor flaws that it had.

Don't get me wrong, I did create a good game, but many aspects of the game's presentation were sub-par.

While the core gameplay and the sounds were adequate, the graphics, user interface and game title were not.

The game's title is the one thing I could never really improve much for either Bombin' or it's sequel Ba-Bomb!  Yeah, the name's OK, but it doesn't really stand out, grab your attention and make you want to try it.  These titles were the only suitable names I could think of at the time that weren't already in use by some other game, as there are only so many variations or associations with "Bomb" in the english language.

For the graphics, I guess I was kind of lazy at the time, and focussed more on the gameplay and programming than on the art.  If the art looks rushed to you, then give yourself a gold star for having a good eye.

And for the UI, it was serviceable, but lazy as well.

It was about the time when I was mostly finished with Bombin' that my mother died.  I think the grief of that experience was one of the factors that contributed to some of the sloppy elements of the game, but I won't make excuses for the quality of my games.
Bombin' was a great learning experience, and I continued to learn from it's development as well as from the development of it's sequel Ba-Bomb!

To be continued...

Studio Piña

Studio Piña is a collection of games that I designed and published.  Check them out, they're free!

Play Studio Piña's Games!

In the future, I hope to detail the design process and challenges that went into making each one of these awesome games.

Welcome to my blog!

Keith Makes Games is a blog about making games; Game design, Game art, Homebrew & Indie games, etc.

I plan on sharing with you my thoughts about game design as well as information and status updates about projects I am working on.

More stuff to follow...