I like to look around the internet for experimental games that capture something lively and appropriately childish. It’s something that Blurst manages to capture very well, but not many others. A few years ago I came across a Japanese designer who goes by the name ABA Games, and he produced a game called Tumiki fighters, which can be accessed from that link.
What I liked most about Tumiki fighers is that it captures an aspect of flexibility that many games – childish or not – fail to make use of. It feels a lot like playing with blocks, and deciding that a door from an old block house may make a good chimney in a new one. Children re-invent the rules of the games they make up all the time, and it was fantastic to see a videogame experiment with a mechanic that could allow that to happen.
More recently I have been thinking about getting my Driver’s License, and writing a mechanics engine that could be used to explain the difference between the center of mass and center of drive, for the purposes of comparing vehicles. This mechanic that ABA Games introduced of adding and removing new parts of a vehicle appealed to me, and so here’s an interesting doodle (just a diagram for now)
After I finish this optics engine, I’m very keen to learn how to integrate Polygonal’s Box2D Physics engine (the one used in Fanstastic Contraption, so it looks like it scales reasonably well)
I hope I’m not the only one who is concerned that your thought train flows immediately from “getting my driver’s license” to “2d physics simulation in Flash”.
As if the thought of you behind the wheel wasn’t scary enough.
Anyway…
Are the wheels always pointing horizontally? Is this a left-right side scroller? One of the challenging/annoying aspects of Tumiki Fighters is that it’s up to you to ensure that the new ship piece collides with you at the correct angle. Do the wheels align and steer themselves intelligently, or is it possible to collect a new wheel at an inconvenient angle?
Is the goal of the game to simply stay “alive” for as long as possible (because your parts begin to decay more quickly as the game progresses), or is there another goal?
Comment by Aidan Fraser — January 7, 2009 @ 7:01 pm
I’m not sure. I see a top-down game, where ‘drive’ wheels snap to the correct orientation, and ‘handling’ wheels can alter their angle. You could have a special mode (at the end of a stage, maybe) where you could restructure your vehicle for some number of seconds.
The aim would be to survive as long as possible, through different landscapes and challenges – you could have non-turning terrain, non-braking terrain etc., and apply forces on the body of the vehicle as it strains against itself..
I think we might have to make this!
Comment by admin — January 7, 2009 @ 7:08 pm