Zen in Osmos

I got around to playing Osmos today and I'm very glad I did. Ever since my Alien Blood Bath hack I've been thinking about flow in games. Osmos might practice flow better than ThatGameCompany's fl0w itself.

If you want to know what is Osmos or why it's awesome you can just read what I read on IndieGames.com's post. The gist of what I'm interested in Osmos is this: it's a game about getting bigger by consuming things smaller than you, becoming big enough to consume the things that were bigger than you, and avoid the things that are at the moment bigger than you ... because they'll consume you. You can become big enough to consume the whole map though that is not your objective and probably not worth your time. You should become big enough to complete the actual map objective , for instance, to chase down a pretty big green thing in this field of huge other things as that thing you're chasing frantically runs from you. As you move you slowly become smaller. The smaller you are, the more susceptible you are to being consumed. So before starting your objective you need to go out and consume enough stuff, which itself is a dangerous activity, until you think you're ready to complete the objective. When you're ready to move from one activity to the other is totally up to you and how ready you think you personally are to complete the objective. If you think you're hot shit you'll spend a small amount of time developing your guy before flying toward the green thing. Otherwise you might take your time and pick smaller things than you to eat until you feel safe and ready to tackle the challenge.

That's how you create flow in a game. Eddy Boxerman, director of Osmos, calls it Zen Gaming. You leave it up to the player to choose the difficulty of the challenges. But you bake this choice into the game itself. These flow ideas are an intrinsic part of Osmos -- it's not just a feature.

Alien Blood Bath

Alien Blood Bath is an open source platformer game built for the Android mobile OS. To say the game's incomplete or unpolished (like Brain says in that video review I have below) is a mistake. Alien Blood Bath is a strong technical achievement in creating a solid, well written, and feature rich tile engine for the greatest mobile platform in the world. Google's Android hit the market late last year with the G1. It's open Google Market will relieve developers of restrictions to digital distribution like the insane filter Apple has on the iPhone App Store. That's why I think an indie game scene needs to start developing on this exciting platform. And Alien Blood Bath is an awesome start.

I checked out the code and wrote a game prototype in an short amount of time thanks to Matt's engine. The zipped project is up on Will Host For Food. I've been experimenting with the idea of backwards time travel in platformers as a mechanic to reduce at times of punishment player frustration and to create a procedural means to allow player learning by repetition but without the tedium. It's a mechanic I'm calling undoing. Every second or so the game state is saved. When you die, or rather, when you get hit, you return to the last game state. The prototype itself is extremely buggy, barely letting me experience the mechanic but it's close enough for something I developed mostly on a Sunday evening. There are huge side effects to the mechanic especially around disorientation though I'm confident that if I develop the idea I might have an incredible recipe for a simple DDA and simple mechanism for game flow in a traditional platformer and other game genres.