Luke M. on the Aaaaa! Mechanic

Luke M., a fellow game designer, was kind enough to write in about the rules behind Aaaaa!. How do we make them better? How do we make them more satisfying? The trick, he says, is this:

Calculating risk isn’t simple, and conveying how risky the players actions were back to them is going to be very damn difficult.

So, let's see what he has to say:

The underlying mechanic is brilliantly simple. It truly is a simple personification of risk vs. reward design.

That said, although the risk is immediately obvious (close to building = inherently risky, people draw off their instinctual knowledge for that) the reward is not as obvious. It took me a while to understand that I acquire hugs faster the closer I am to a building. Or atleast I assume I do… I guess the main thing here is that the feedback mechanism for reward isn’t clear enough in contrast of the super obvious risk mechanism.

Ok so now here is my main thing. Scoring a kiss doesn’t seem to take into account proximity. If it does then I guess the problem is that it’s not obvious to me that it does, and you can ignore everything below!

Scoring a kiss is, to me as a designer at least, far riskier. To score hugs, I can get slowly closer and closer to the building and if I get too closer, then I’ll just get bumped. Scoring a really close kiss to a top edge however is a totally different prospect, get a tiny bit too close and SPLAT, you hit the top edge of the structure. The risk is on a totally new level. What I would love is if a kiss used proximity as well, and this proximity was based purely off the horizontal axis, like so:



To me, skimming those edges is the massive risk. That, and seeing the top edge of a building whip past at some huge speed is immensely satisfying.

Even riskier is doing something like this:



Now we are doing really risky behavior, simply because as you approach a maximum horizontal speed, you have less viable options in terms of adjusting your trajectory. I would just love to see this kind of crazy behavior rewarded in some way as well, although I’m not sure what a good mechanic for conveying this concept would be. Perhaps a combination of proximity and horizontal velocity?

I should mention that, as Luke says, the game does not actually take into account proximity for kisses. After a bit of back-and-forth, he expanded on his thoughts:

I can completely understand why the system works the way it does, and it seems obvious to me now. I think one major think that threw me was the presence of a proximity meter on the side of the screen. Seeing this made me think that there must be an association with the scoring mechanism.

I guess although it’s nice to have a meter, I can already see how close I am to a building based off what is on screen. Additionally feedback like a crazy “whipping past something close to me” sound that scales in as I get closer and closer , or some mild screen shake could even replace the meter. This could also add some positive visceral feedback as a reward to skimming really close to the buildings.

(Random anecdote: I remember the first game I worked on, a GBA title. It was a fighting game with a good old fashioned combo meter. The more dudes you killed in a set amount of time, the more points you got. On the combos, we had this amazing sound that would sound better and higher every time your combo went up. People were striving for combos, trying to pull off the craziest ones they could just to hear how high the feedback sound would go.. they didn’t eve care about the points! It was surprising to me just how powerful some auditory feedback was to the player, where as the actual intended reward of more points had much less of an impact, depending on the type of player).

The idea of a kiss being 1000pts and a hug being 100pts is also super interesting. It would seem to be in the players best interests to try and score tons of kisses with lots of horizontal traversal, as each Kiss yields the same as 10 hug ‘moments’, or better yet, stay near a building scoring hugs while skimming nearby objects for kisses. This obviously makes for some interesting choices for the player to make in terms of their path... however with my obvious confusion from the previous email, I was making path choices based off the totally wrong mechanism! I guess although it is surely displayed on the score screen, I wasn’t previously aware of just how much a kiss is worth, compared to a measly hug J. (Now that I think about it, its named rather brilliantly, as a kiss is a more intimate expression than a hug).

In regards to the ’just skim the building’ issue, one possible solution to encourage players to make some super risky moves would be some scoring plate placements. Better yet, as the super risky stuff usually involves rapid horizontal traversal, some vertically aligned plates could have some fun placements:

I think he's potentially onto something, and have prodded our internal team about this. (Especially since I'd like to focus more on audio design.) But I'd like to invite comment -- what does everyone else think?