NimbleBit

This past weekend I participated in the Global Game Jam at the Sunnyvale location (near San Francisco). There were 50 people at my location. It was fun, crazy, intense, insomnia inducing, stressful, and incredibly rewarding. I was at last year’s GGJ too which you can read about here.

The theme this year was “Deception” which is great because it instantly gets you thinking.

There are two ways I can think how to make a game about deception.

1. The game rules or AI deceive the player
2. The game encourages players to deceive each other

Number 2 is so much more interesting!

This got me thinking, in order to create deception there must also be trust. So there are two opposing forces, trust and deception. It feels like there should be three people.

So here is the pitch:

One player is trying to find their way through a maze to the exit.
Another player is trying to help them.
Another player is trying to hinder them.
But the first player doesn’t know which is which. The first player must take the advice both are giving and decide which is trying to be deceptive.

This is played between 3 different computers (which is quite a technical challenge for a 48 hour game jam!) and because of this, doing it with a web server and Flash seemed to make sense. There are two inputs to the game. There is a chat room which all 3 players communicate through and the first player (which we call the Monk) can click on objects in the world.

So I got together with Gabe Smedresman and Brendan Mauro. We used Friday night to discuss the concept some more and came up with a ton of really great ideas as well as found some obvious flaws. We even managed to run a few paper prototypes. By the time we went to sleep, we were feeling confident about the game but also cautious about the technical hurdles ahead.

Saturday was when the bulk of the implementation happened. Gabe started work on server communication, Brenden started working on art, and I started work on random maze generation. Fast forward and by about 4 am we had run a couple of play tests. Of course we wanted to start play tests by about 6pm. We were only 10 hours off, not bad!

We had all the elements in place. There we monsters and poison potions that could hurt the Monk and health potions that could give him a hit point back. The Monk could move between rooms and reach the exit to win. If he loses all his hit points, he loses.

By this point we had established a lot more of the game mechanics and rules.

1. The start and end location are picked at random in the 5 room by 5 room maze. They must be at least 3 rooms apart though.
2. Monsters and potions are randomly placed throughout the world.
3. The Monk only sees the current room they are in along with the doors to exit the current room.
4. Both spirits (as we call them) each get to see what the Monk sees plus a mini-map with 2 random rooms revealed (both of them see 2 different random rooms but they may randomly be the same rooms) AND one random adjacent room to where the Monk currently is.
5. The hindering spirit also gets to know exactly where the exit room is while the helping spirit only knows how far away the exit is.
6. We also found that deniability was important which is why the two spirits can only see part of the world. This is so the hindering spirit can lead the monk into a room with 2 monsters and claim they didn’t know the monsters were there but the alternative path was not good either. This works the other way where the helping spirit may lead the player into the room with 2 monsters and now the Monk is thinking the helping spirit is the hindering spirit.

After catching a few hours of sleep, we started polishing up the game on Sunday. We added improved graphics, a custom ambient sound track, custom sound effects, better animation, and a few more gameplay tweaks. We also got to playtest it a few more times and this is when we realized we had made a really fun game!

At 3pm it was time to present all the games to the group. We barely made it on time. There were a lot of cool games which you can see here. A few of my favorites were M.O.N.K., Ninja Skunk (Both of these are 2 player games and great fun!), and Grandma’s Boy (Fantastic animation work!). It is truly amazing what a small group of passionate people can do with 48 hours.

We presented our game and got a lot of laughs when I (as the hindering spirit) lead the Monk to a poison potion which ended his journey. The presentation was short (about 5 minutes) but I believe we showed how deception can be used in a game at the very core of the gameplay mechanics quite well.

Path of the Monk is a game played almost entirely in the heads of the three players. The game rules are simple and open in order to allow the three players to play the game the way they want to play it.

So grab a couple of friends and try it out: Path of the Monk

P.S. Gabe posted a few more bonus images here including one of a fan desperately trying to keep his computer from overheating, it worked and saved the project. Thank you fan.