Darryl Long

This week I watched a presentation from Ojiro Fumoto about his mobile action roguelike game Downwell which can be found here. He discusses his thinking process in creating the game and the idea to have a single button complete two functions. 

The original idea for his game came from his basic want of a game that was like Spelunky that would be playable on the mobile. From this initial idea he builds layers of functionality and constraints on until he created Downwell. Fumoto mentioned having played mobile action games before and finding that having less buttons made the game better to play. He made a constraint for himself that the game would only have three buttons, having this constraint he found the idea for controls to have two functionalities and came across the idea when the player jumped if they jumped again they would fire boots from the bottom of the gun which became the foundation of the game. He then bases the next iterations of the game to be built around this mechanic of the game to improve the feel and gameplay of the game.

This idea of putting constraints on himself forced Fumoto to explore different and unique options into implementing the game. Fumoto then embraces the mechanics that he implemented, changing the initial ideas he had to accommodate to a better experience with the new mechanics that were implemented. The lessons to take from this is to be more open-minded in how we are able to accomplish something, instead of adding a new control for a feature that you want to add, you should think about how can we add this to the existing control set or can this be implemented to the level design instead. Furthermore, we shouldn’t be close-minded in our implementation of our games, as we develop our games the requirements and constraints changes and our game might not turn out to the way that we first intended it to, this is when we have to stop and think about how we are implementing the game and whether our design is still complimenting our  mechanics.