Who doesn't love arcade games?
They're easy to pick up and play, full of action and excitement, and they're great for when you've only got a few minutes to spend playing.
Now, I could easily talk to you about a classic arcade game that has aged really well and tell you all the reasons why it's a great game, but instead I'm going to discuss a game that was never popular, Exidy's Hard Hat.
Why would I discuss an obscure, mediocre arcade game? Well, I believe that we can often learn more from failures than successes, and I believe that Hard Hat had some interesting and original ideas behind it that would be fun to explore.
So, what is Hardhat?
Hardhat is an arcade game that was programmed in 1982 by Larry W. Hutcherson Sr. and published by Exidy.
On the arcade flyer, Hard Hat is billed as the "First educational coin-op game" and described as "a unique logic game with an educational puzzle to solve".
By modern standards though, Hard Hat is more of an action/puzzle game with a stronger focus on action than puzzle.
In Hardhat you play as a handyman, represented by a hardhat with legs, who runs around removing pieces of scaffolding that fill the screen. When the scaffolding is removed from one side of the screen, everything slides over one space, and new scaffolding comes in from the other side. Along with the scaffolding, there are occasional sections of wall that cannot be removed and must be navigated around. The goal of the game is to position letters atop the word in the center of the screen. For example, the first stage's word is Exidy and you must position the E,X,I,D and Y into the correct spots. Letters will slide onto the screen along with the new scaffolding. You can position letters either by pushing them, or by sliding the scaffolding over by removing it from one side of the screen. When all letters are in place, you receive bonus points and move onto the next stage.
To provide challenge are the enemies: hammers which roam around the screen at random, and tornadoes,which target the player's position at the time the tornado appears. Both tornadoes and hammers will kill the player if they collide with him, but tornadoes will also remove walls and randomly reposition any letters that come into contact with it. The only way to get rid of enemies is to scroll them off screen or by pushing a letter into them, which isn't all that easy to do.
By itself, Hardhat is an OK game, but the random movement of the hammers combined with the awkwardness of needing to position letters by using the screen sliding mechanic keep it from warranting much replay.
What I want to do with this game is to make a few minor changes to it in an attempt to make it more fun.
So, what exactly can we do with this game?
The ultimate goal would be to keep the game's same basic mechanics: joystick only control, removing pieces of scaffolding to shift the playfield around, placing letters and avoiding enemies, but somehow make the game more enjoyable. To do this, we need to address the game's flaws. Let's start with the enemies.
The tornado seems to work pretty well: it keeps the player from staying in one spot too long, it redefines the maze/screen, and it can foil your efforts to place the letters in the correct spot. Since this works well, let's instead focus on the hammers. The hammers are random and can go anywhere except through walls and letters. The randomness makes it hard to predict where they will go, and instead of making it exciting, makes for uninteresting gameplay. To make the hammers more interesting, we need to give them better AI. With better AI, 2 things happen: First, the player's objective becomes more defined - run away from the hammers, because they're out to get you. Second, the game gets much harder.
We can balance out the difficulty by making the AI more complex than just having it make a bee-line towards the player. As the player removes pieces of scaffolding, he creates paths or open areas on the screen. If the hammers chase the player through the paths, but also have a little randomness: reversing direction, targeting a different direction, wandering, etc., then we can balance out the difficulty a little.
The other major flaw that I see with this game is that there's no real way to deal with the enemies other than to avoid them. Avoiding enemies all the time may be challenging, but isn't all that much fun. To remedy this, we need some kind of attack.
Taking a cue from the timeless classic Pac-Man, we can add temporary power-up's.
Keeping with the construction theme, we can use a buzz-saw as our power-up.
Buzz-saw icons can occasionally slide in along with the new scaffolding. When the player collects one of these icons, he can turn into a spinning buzz-saw blade temporarily. In this state, the player can move more quickly, destroy walls, and will kill any hammers he collides with.
With these 2 changes, the game should become more dynamic and interesting to play while still retaining the same basic gameplay mechanics that it was designed around.
That's the theory anyway.
To prove that this game can go from mediocre to rockstar with just a few changes, I'll need to start by recreating the original game, then adding the new features and changes.
I'll be building this game in Clickteam Fusion 2.5, and will share with you my work in-progress step by step.
Before I conclude this blog entry, I'd like to share one more thing with you:
These are the original arcade graphics that you can view in Mame. Looking at these, you might notice a couple things:
First, the tornado uses an amazingly long 16 frame animation loop, but the player only uses 4 frames of animation for the walk cycles.
Second, it appears that the game has unused animations of the player being squished.
This is interesting, because it means that sometime during production of this game, the player must have been able to be squished by the walls.
This was obviously removed due to the extra difficulty it would have added to the game, seeing that without that feature, it's already a challenge just to pass the first round without practice.
To be continued...
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