So, do you have any control over the forward/backward movement? Or do you, basically, only control up/down? I mean, if you follow a narrow corridor, and it ends in a dead-end, is there a way out, or is it simply game over? Could you, if you wanted to, stop and "look around" (spin in place)?
Anyway, neat concept. It seems though, that it wouldn't work in 3D (say as from a first-person perspective) very well. If you did that, you'd essentially have a FPS-type game, minus the guns and enemies. Well, that's my perception anyway. I suspect that as the game's creator, you could come up with some interesting ideas/applications to put it into 3D. Not that you need to or should. I was just thinking "Huh, that's a neat little demo/game/concept. I wonder what it'd be like if done in 3D?" I suppose I sort of answered my own question there.
Good luck on it. Any thoughts of releasing it? Or is it part of a bigger project? Mouser X over and out.
You have full control over your motion, but the stuff behind you decays so fast that most of the time you just want to run/fly forward. Originally I had planned for you to be able to look around, the idea was to have to keep looking behind you (thus "paranoia"). I haven't actually implemented being able to look in different directions, though you can move in any direction. It would probably make the current game too easy, though that would then allow the levels to get harder...
Regarding 3D: You do have a first person view, but rather than put that view onscreen, I show the pixels that you can see (or have recently seen). This requires the screen to be the same dimension as the space being navigated, so I don't see it being applied in 3D. You could do the same computation in 3D, but if you render it with a normal projection from that same viewpoint it'll just be a white screen :)
It's sort of a compromise: on the one hand you have a top-down view so you can more easily get a sense of the space, on the other you can't actually see the objects themselves, just this field of vision, and you don't know anything about stuff that's out of sight, which moves it closer to the navigation difficulty of first-person.
I'll see if I can put together a few levels for it, and one way or another I'll probably release it in a week.
I put together a windows build with the help of py2exe and a lot of time stripping out unneeded stuff, still weighs in at 3 MB but it was 6x that before. I'd appreciate if someone could give it a try, here it be (rev 21).
Ah, I just figured out that the game doesn't like it when you sit still. Essentially, if you don't start moving almost immediately, the decay happens so fast, that the red dot can't keep up. For me, I found that to be a little... difficult. For one thing, this requires that you make lots of very quick split-second decisions. By itself, that's fine. That's part of the game, and is part of what makes it challenging. The problem I have is split-second decisions and requiring very fine controls. I have a difficult enough time with making the decisions, but then, once the decision is made, I no longer have the time/reflexes necessary to move the dot through very small holes. Perhaps, at some point, you could add a "difficulty" setting, where it allows you to modify the rate of decay? Or, if the red dot isn't moving, the white area doesn't decay either.
Perhaps my "playstyle" is interfering with your idea here. What I mean is that I love exploration. When I saw your videos, one of the thoughts I frequently had was "Wouldn't it be neat to sort of 'map out' the area?" I realize that's not the point of your game (that of "mapping it out" - there's still some exploration necessary, just not nearly as much), but since that's often an underlying aspect of my game playing, perhaps I'm (subconsciously) attempting to analyze the surroundings too much, and am therefore unable to make the necessary decisions and moves, to traverse the terrain you've provided.
Anyway, what I've run through so far is pretty interesting. For me, at least, it'd be nice if the rate of decay wouldn't go past the red dot though. I don't mind the area behind disappearing (it makes sense), but once the area behind is gone, the area in front starts to disappear as well (if the dot stays still). Once that happens, it's impossible to "catch up".
I posted more, but it was all relating to the fact that I hadn't yet realized that if you don't move, the visual decay goes right past the red dot, making the game unplayable (see above about it going past the red dot).
That's my comments on it so far. Neat concept. I'll attempt to fiddle with it a little more. Mouser X over and out.
Mouser, the idea is that once the black catches up to you, it's game over. For whatever reason I can only think of games with an exercise in avoiding death (so far, anyway). The idea of the score ticking away was that the level would be impossible to beat, and you'd just try to rack up a score.
I understand what you're saying about exploration, but once you take away failure, what's the goal? I don't think I want a maze. And I don't think I can create blocklands interesting enough to be worth exploring for their own sake.
This is a somewhat hard level, even though I've played it a hundred times and know the layout by heart I still can't make it through each time. Ideally there will be slower ones, and multiple levels (so all progress isn't lost), later on.
Thanks for trying it out, glad to see it works on untainted systems.
I think I'm done with this for now, put up a new release on that page. Let me know how it goes.
edited 11:42 PM EDT July 23, 2010
A Change of Plans by hcs at 1:52 PM EDT on August 12, 2010
I recently got another game experiment into a playable state, it's called A Change of Plans. Do please let me know how you feel about it if you give it a spin, and how it runs.
Well there is the "par" if you want to try meeting or beating it. That's the best I was able to do on each level, so I'd be entertained to hear it done better. Thanks for trying it out.