Eric Butler’s Weblog

Friday marked the deadline of the first ever round of GCS competitions. One of the other things Andrew Fox and I wanted to try this year was small game competitions in addition to the normal semester-long projects. We messed a lot of things up with this run (as expected), but it was a surprising success, especially our game competition. You can check out the entries (and vote on the results) on our forums. We’ll be giving out prizes, too, like a free copy of Spore.

I entered a submission into both the game design and music competitions. The game compo’s theme was a one-button game, and the music compo’s theme was “airship cruising.” So being the lazy individual I am, I combined the two and wrote a little Game Maker game called Sky Sailing. The game music causes problems on some systems, so if it doesn’t run, try the one without music.

Download Game: Windows EXE, Windows EXE without music
Download Song: MP3, OGG

I was surprisingly pleased by how these turned out. The game mechanic involves using the space bar to control your ship and smash other enemies while avoiding mines. Tapping the space bar cause you to gain altitude while holding the space bar charges a “blast shot” that launches you forward and destroys enemies.

My personal goal was to explore the limits of how much information a game can extract from the player in a single button. Just how much complexity can you extract from a button while maintaining some sense of simplicity and usablitiy. I broke 2D movement down by distingusihing two parts of a button presses: how long you hold a button and how often you press the button. It gives you surprising field of movement all over the playing field, though the controls are still sluggish and clunky and could stand for more tuning.

Anyway, enjoy! And go check out the other entries. There were some really amazing ones.