I’ve been asking people what they want to read about on this blog, and most people who are interested at all have asked me to write about my games and how I developed them. I only have one current game that is far enough along to discuss without fear of having the idea stolen, and it’s a game that has actually had a pretty large impact on my focus. As you’ll see, what started out as a simple game design ended up changing my entire site, and birthing a few other games.

Back in June I was noticing a serious decrease in my site traffic. The games I had been working on were built mostly for Newgrounds and while I was compensated for my time, the lack up updates had started to hurt the site. I knew I not only needed to get something new up and ready, but I also had to rethink the direction of PsychoGoldfish.com. Obversity was kind of the starting point for it all.

Previously I had just made pretty site layouts with minimal attention to my market. I wasn’t making games for anyone in particular and I wasn’t getting stuff out on a regular basis.

I spent hours on Alexa and Google running searched for “online games”, “free games”, “web games” and tons of variations in search terms, comparing the top results on Alexa to see who was maximizing their traffic the best. After a lot of research I knew the direction I needed to go was to appeal to the casual game market. This meant making polished games with simple gameplay that could be played for short periods and still be satisfying enough to be playable for longer bits.

Puzzle games were doing VERY well. People were still buzzing about stables like Zuma and Bejeweled, and I knew I had it in me to make something that was just as fun.

The trick with puzzle games is they are all so similar. How do you make something original in such a saturated market? As much as I hated the idea of using a crutch… I knew I needed a gimmick.

And so I thought about what kind of gimmick I could use, and I came up with the idea of flipping tiles. While the gimmick seemed to have potential, the gameplay I first hammered out wasn’t all that fun. You would flip a tile and if the new color made a chain of 3 or more tiles it would blow them up.

In theory it was a good idea, but I noticed the game was far too hard and I didn’t feel like I had very much control as I played it. I did love the way the flipping tiles looked so I kept the core gimmick and built an idea around it.

Looking at the first version as a player rather than a programmer, I knew I wanted more control. The solution was so obvious that I felt extremely dumb for not thinking of it in the first place. Why not let the player flip any tile, any number of times, and then have the option to detonate the color chain, or just flip some more. What I ended up with was a tile that basically had a button in the corner to flip, and if you clicked the main larger area of the tile it would try and detonate a color chain, assuming you had 3 of the same colors adjacent to each other.

The gameplay was perfect. I hadn’t yet polished the scripting, but it was presentable enough that I showed it to a bunch of people ranging from other flash developers, to online friends that don’t even know how to OPEN flash.

The results were pretty unanimous, people thought it was a ton of fun, even with all the bugs.

One of the people was Stamper, who liked it so much he offered to do some kick ass art for the game. He spent a few days making tiles and showed me some samples.

In my original tile, there were no real ‘buttons’ on the tiles, rather if you clicked a tab in the corner it would flip, and if you clicked anywhere else it would detonate. While it worked, it was a bit frustrating when you accidentally detonated a tile and you meant to flip it.

Stamper’s tile designs had actual buttons on the tile for flipping and detonating, with a bit of un-clickable space between them. His tile designs looked great and were a lot more practical than my originals.

Then, as it tends to do, the real world stuck it’s foot in and Stamper found himself so busy with work that he didn’t have the time to finish his tiles. The project sat in limbo for a bit and we weren’t sure when we’d get back to it.

I am not the kind of guy who likes to waste time, especially when the fate of my site was hanging in the balance. But rather than launching Obversity the way it was, I took some elements and some scripting and put my mind to making another game.

I knew I had a great, original idea with Obversity, and I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to get anything quite as original done in the short timeline I imposed on myself. What I did next was take a look at a few of the most popular puzzle games of the time. They all seemed to have a simple control scene; users could swap 2 tiles and if the colors matched when you flipped them, they would blow up.

Well, that type of game surely was simple enough to code in a day or 2, but I didn’t think a simple bejeweled clone had any potential. I needed a new gimmick, but one that I could use with the tried and true control scheme of tile swapping. I started thinking about what I could match. Colors… numbers… shapes…. no matter what it was still going to look like a ripoff matching game.

Then it hit me like a brick… there is a game EVERYONE knows how to play, and it’s not about matching.

Rock Paper Scissors.

When I applied that gimmick to the game, suddenly the rules changed. Flipping a tile wouldn’t make any of the tiles you flip explode because they wouldn’t match anything, rather, they would explode whatever symbol they ‘beat’ by traditional RPS rules.

With the introduction of this simple gimmick, the whole idea of a bejeweled clone completely changed and the game became very original.

As I started playing with it I knew simply using RPS symbols was going to make this game way too easy. I noticed the real challenge wasn’t in clearing blocks, rather, it was in building big combos.

In a lot of puzzle games building a large combo sometimes gave you a powerup so I opted to make the tiles become “chargeable” by getting a large combo. The charged tiles would take out a full row if you were able to make them explode, and this made room to add obstacles to the game in the form of blank tiles.

With the blank tiles, you would start to see your screen fill with useless blocks and your chances to blow up tiles would begin to lower. Obviously at some point the blank tiles would ruin the game, so the ‘charged’ tiles became the perfect solution for the player to clear those pesky blocks.

Once I got all these gameplay elements in, I played it some more. Even with blank tiles dropping in as I cleared blocks, it was way too easy. It took a VERY long time for enough blank blocks to drop in that they became imposing, and once they started it almost got too hard, too fast.

I tried starting the game with a lot of blank blocks, which made it challenging, but I thought it would ruin the enjoyability of the game for new players. I needed a way to make the game’s challenge progress at a more consistent rate.

As I though of options, I also realized there was no sense of urgency. I remember playing tertis back in the day, and when the blocks would get higher I would be so intense and it just sucked my soul into the game. How could I add that kind of intensity in a game that didn’t really have a way to ‘die’

The answer was pretty easy: I needed to have a goal, and I needed to have a time limit.

By introducing a goal, I had a simple way to add ‘levels’. every time you would reach the goal, you would start a fresh level which would have more and more blank tiles in it, and the time limit would start to become smaller.

The gameplay was awesome, especially considering I only spent a week and a half on it. I showed the demo around as I was doing some final debugging and people really liked it, I even picked up a sponsorship.

So after tightening it up I launched the game and awaited the results.

People on Newgrounds didn’t vote it very high, the reviews were pretty mixed, and all in all it did okay. It seemed like it was ranking as just an average game. Then I started looking at the scoreboards and saw something interesting. Female names. I had tapped into something, and my logs were showing that in spite the reviews and votes, the game was actually pretty popular, just not popular with the same people I usually was.

While RPS Blockade wasn’t a breakout hit, and it didn’t get my site traffic back up, it DID show that my research about the casual gaming audience was pretty accurate. And so I redesigned PsychoGoldfish.com as I began my next game: Mini-Putt Online.

Mini-Putt was a franchise I knew I couldn’t really lose with. It had always ranked well, and I also knew it was the kind of casual game people that liked RPS would enjoy. I had been working on multiplayer stuff for a long time and it was the perfect platform to merge my goals with my aspirations.

Thanks to the research I put in when starting Obversity, the new site was a hit and I saved my traffic levels from obscurity.

Then real life attacked again. Ad rates hit an all-time low, and never really picked up. After all my work to fix my traffic and expand my audience, I was still barely making end’s meet.

When you need money, and you got a family, you do what you gotta so. And I started picking up some side jobs for extra cash. Thankfully the work I put into my site was enough for it to sustain itself, but I was pretty bummed that I had to,once again, cut into my production time.

Now, I am starting to get a bit of time. It’s not much, but I decided to use it wisely. I dusted off obversity and took a look at it with fresh eyes. Stamper was no longer able to work on it, so I started from the bottom up. Using his ideas I redesigned the tiles myself to use the flip and detonate buttons and began coding a sprite demo that would do the dynamic coloring and show the tile flipping.

I spent 2 days just making them look the way I wanted. They didn’t look quite as bright and traditional as my original designs, but they did feel like little bomb detonators now, and more importantly, the were a lot easier to control.

I am currently working on the re-scripting of Obversity, making tile chains blow up, and having the top tiles drop into place. I hope to have the game done in a week or 2 at most, but I am also focusing on getting some other site projects running with the goal of generating some extra revenue within a year.