Analyzing Bomberman 64 multiplayer

I recently went to a Unity User Group in my city (Guadalajara), and in this particular meeting we were going to be able to show our games to the others, so I took Jumpjutsu with me and presented it. I haven't had a chance to update here my progress, but well, this entry is not about that exactly.

As you might know, Jumpjutsu is going to be mainly a multiplayer game. Currently if the player that killed other players is killed, the players he killed revive. Say Tom kills Jerry, and Itchy kills Tom, Jerry would revive. So only the player that kills all the others would win. It certainly could lead to infinite matches, but that could be solved by making the game more hostile (e.g. stronger items) or putting a timer.

Anyway, when I explained this, and explained the purpose of it: "keeping the players interested in the game, even if they died", multiple people said - "ah! like Bomberman!" - and well, even if it's not the same, I could certainly learn some things from Bomberman and improve my design. So I will make a quick analysis about Bomberman 64 multiplayer mode, writing it here will help my analysis, and may help you to notice some of the different elements of this game:

I played a lot this with my brothers and cousins when I was a kid, and I really enjoyed it, it was very fun and just remember playing it makes me want to play it again (it would be great to make a game that evokes that, right?).

Rules:

1. The main goal is to blow up the other players. The last player standing in a match gets a point, or if the 3 minutes timer ends, whoever is still alive gets a point. The player that gets 3 points wins.
2. The one that bring us here: when you die, you become a ghost. Ghosts can possess for a few seconds other players that are still alive, so they can posses the others and do things like dropping bombs close or run towards bombs close to explode. You are not able to win, but you can affect the results, and with a bit of lucky produce a draw. So, in some ways, losing is kind of cool because you don't have to fear dead, and can continue playing. Nobody stops playing!
3. Players can get power ups, the ones I can remember are bigger explosions, speedup, and red bombs. They were also some curses, for example make you bigger and slower so you are more likely to be in the range of explosions, another kind-of-curse is to catch fire, you would kill others when touching them, but blow up if you touch any bomb. When you die your power ups spawn from you and others can get them.
4. About the movements, you can place bombs, kick them, stop them while sliding, grab and throw them, and make them bigger.

In other Bomberman games, instead of having the "Ghost mode", you become a cannon that throws bombs from the margin of the map, however I haven't play that so I'm not sure how good it feels compared to the Ghost mode. The reason to have a different dynamic could be that those games are similar to the original Bomberman, i.e. 2D gameplay in a grid map... I don't know why people preferred that, I really liked the N64 version.

Making decisions

I'm not going to go very deep into game theory, but a fundamental piece of a game to be fun is to be able to make decisions. What decisions you can make in this game? well, some of them are:

Who should I attack now? Should I select just one? Throw some random bombs? Should I attack the strongest opponent? Should I throw a big bomb? Where should I go (which of these bombs is closer to explode)? What power ups I should take? What power ups I should not take? Should I look for power ups instead of attacking? What power ups I should try to take from others?

Many of these decisions are taken constantly and quickly in any point of a match.

Ending the game

There are multiple features to make sure the matches are short and fun:

1. The powerups play an important role in this game, the more power you have the easier is to kill others or to die, it is a balancing factor and helps to make the game more dangerous with the time. In Bomberman it is not rare to die because of your own bombs.
2. Also, there is a timer, so if you are being too coward, you know the others will get a point as well, you don't want that. The timer not only ends the game after 3 minutes, it is a trigger that injects sense of urgency to the players so they focus on winning the match.
3. Not enough? well, when there is only 1 minute left the arena enters in "sudden death mode", so the players can die by wall pressing, meteorites, or drawn, it varies depending on the map you are playing.

Variety

In this game you can customize the characters, selecting different heads, arms, body, and legs. They don't make any difference in the game, they only look cool :)... well also when you win a point you can here "yay!" if you are using custom parts.
There are different scenarios as well, I think there are 6 of them, each one has some particular features that make them different to the others, so the decisions you take are affected by them. This is important because otherwise you could easily feel all matches are the same.

Rewarding the winner

When a match ends you see this screen where the winner receives a medal, and you character does a small victory animation. When you get three points and win the game, you see a bigger animation, with music, etc. As a game designer it's easy to overlook this detail, but I believe it has an important psychological effect in the players, it helps to conclude the game, to accept who won and get ready for the next round, and specially to reward the player that won! Without this, win would not feel that good.

Conclusions

This analysis has helped me to notice some important elements I could miss in Jumpjutsu, so let me take note:

1. Decisions. Make sure the players have multiple decisions to take simultaneously.
2. Speed. The game must feel quick and exciting.
3. Rewards. I need to reward the winner! Also, reward the losers with a little fun.
4. Maps. I need to have multiple maps, and if possible, that affect the players' decisions.
5. Items or powerups. They don't just balance the game, they help to end it quickly!
6. Ending the game. Make sure the game ends, and don't fear to use multiple techniques for that.
7. Keep playing. Why just give the losers the hope of continue playing... can I make an interesting mechanic to keep the losers playing and having fun?

Well, I may be able to find some more interesting things in this game, but let's just stop here for now :), hope you find this useful!

I survived my first Global Game Jam

How to survive to the Global Game Jam? Even when I have some experience making games, I don't pretend to be an expert, I have just participated in a couple game jams, for the first one (Winter Jam) we didn't finish our game, for the second one (Global Game Jam 2015) we completed Burn & Run Kamikaze Heroes (BARKH), and I am very satisfied with it actually. So, what was the difference?

1. Scope
2. Emergency exit
3. Organization
4. The basic stuff
5. Luck

Scope

We programmers have a mental problem, we are always too optimistic, not necessarily in life but when coding we are. When we started with BARKH's idea we discussed a little about how should we do it, I was planning to do it in a kind of open and dark place, Lal0l thought about it as an auto-generated labyrinth from the beginning, and we were really close to go for it, however we decided to do it just if we would end up with some extra time (yeah sure). So we decided to do a hardcoded labyrinth. I'm pretty sure that do the auto-generated one would take most of our time because of unexpected bugs.

So the tip here is: If you have an idea that sounds kind of complex, but possible. DON'T EVEN DARE TO TRY IT, the Jam have enough things to invest your time on, but discover how stupid you were when you though it was going to be simple it's not a good one. Better to use a temporary version that works and can be thrown away if anything changes in your plans.

Emergency exit

If possible think different ways to make your game a playable game if something terrible happens. Imagine that suddenly they say you will have only the half of the time you originally thought. What would you do? what would be your real scope? can you cut a couple levels? can you remove all those extra abilities and super powers? would your game be playable without them?

Think how could you do your game playable without all this, and make sure the emergency exit is actually easy to follow.

Then if you find out you are running out of time you can go for one of those exits. Remember, it is much better to present a short complete game, than a super cool idea that you didn't finish.

Organization

Well I have not that much to say about this (we were only two in the team :)) however in the previous Jam we were 3 in the team, and I can tell that 3 laptops running Unity were not as useful as two laptops well used in the GGJ. Since only one had Unity installed we made all the Unity stuff in one of them, the other was used for graphics, music, sound, investigate, get resources.

Maybe this piece of advice is obvious in an heterogeneous team, but if you are a bunch of programmers, don't mess with GitHub for a 2 days project, use your resources to get all the other stuff done and ready to be plugged into your game once the main gameplay is done, e.g. the title/credits/gameover screens, the music, the sounds, and so on.

The basic stuff
I think this one is the one which I noticed lacking more in the projects I saw in the jam.

1. Screen flow. A very simple step which makes a huge difference in how a game "feels" is whether it has a complete screen flow, i.e.:
• Title screen - give a good first impression
• <Optional> Story - explain what is the player trying to do, is the player trying to find anything? kill anything? survive? make the player's mission important. If you don't put this screen at least explain the purpose of the game in the gameplay.
• The game - well this one almost nobody forgets about it, those who don't have this are the ones which go and explain that they didn't make it on time.
• <Optional> Game over - show a quick screen when the user dies (not just reboot at the start of the level). It makes the game to feel more complete and you can use it to reinforce the theme of your game, or even make the player laugh and give another try.
• The win - reward your players with a good ending, is the less you can do to thank them for playing your game.
• <Optional> Credits - recognize all those who helped to have the game done.
2. Music & sounds - music and sound makes your game to feel complete, they are not just additional stuff, music helps to give a feeling to the players, and sound give them feedback about the game itself, "was that something good or bad?", "was it an interacting object?", "did I click that button?"...
3. The GAME. Why your game is a game? can I win? can I loose? is it difficult enough to be fun? is it easy enough to be played? does the player have a purpose? is it fun? Of course that some types of games don't really need all this, but most of them do.
4. The theme. How is your game related to the jam's theme? The theme is a tool to push you in new ways of thinking, I mean, if the theme is pushing you to make a bad game obviously you need to keep thinking and bounce ideas with other people. The theme could push you to learn new stuff, if you only know to do Mario-style platformers, then doing something similar is fine but the theme could help you to explore from other perspective, instead of just make another Mario.

Luck

Certainly you might need a bit of luck, for example the day that the GGJ began my computer's hard disk crashed, it got damaged so I couldn't bring my computer with Unity to the jam. That seemingly not really nice coincidence forced us to do what I explained in the point above about organization.

Will you find good a team? will you find those free resources you need? will your brain want to work and give you a marvelous idea? will your computer explode?

My advice: a positive attitude to whatever happen in there will make the difference between a really awesome weekend and two days of frustration :).

Hope this help you for your next jam!