Gameplay. Designers love it. It makes us wobble like blancmanges and burst out in song for no apparent reason. This part of the blog’s all about what gameplay changes we made for the final version of Chime and why. As mentioned in previous blogs, the core mechanics were fantastic. However, the Lab – the experimental part of Zoë Mode where Chime had mostly been developed – is a fast moving environment where ideas are dreamt up and played around with. Its goal isn’t to produce a finished game, so there’s always some tweaking needed.

Timers

The first thing we looked at was the in-game timer. Chime has a time limit, and the player can extend it through doing well in the game. This was a good thing and provided a challenge. However, we reckoned there were three problems:

• It wasn’t clear enough which  game mechanic actually extended a player’s time
• There was no definite end to the game – you could continue to play after the timer had run out, but not score, and this felt a bit anti-climactic
• The time limits were darn hard! I mean really, really hard

Originally we wanted to try out a completely new idea instead of timers – we thought about introducing what we called ‘Discords’, which were like an evil virus of disharmony. These would spread at an increasingly fast rate and be a counter force to the player trying to cover the grid – in other words, the player vs. the Discords. Essentially they would be a visual timer, but also give us the opportunity to add extra gameplay features, like bonuses if you managed to surround a group of Discords. In the end, however, we decided that this might stray too much from the core gameplay experience.

Instead, we focused on the problem areas of the existing timer and addressed each one in turn. The time bonuses are awarded in Chime for reaching certain coverage milestones. The first thing we did was to make a very definite visual connection between the coverage and a time bonus. We made the coverage glow, and showed the time bonus flying up to the timer, then adding to it. We reinforced this by adding the text “coverage bonus”, and of course by explaining it in a tutorial (although we should never rely on people reading the tutorials). Finally, we reproduced most of the tutorial text a bit at a time in a pre-game hints screen.

We then put a very definite end to the game in… if you ran out of time, the game was over. No arguments. I said NO ARGUMENTS. There. This both introduced a much more clear-cut challenge and removed a bit of confusion as to why the game carried on when you couldn’t score. We created a free mode for those people who wanted to explore without time limits.

Finally, we tweaked the time limits and the time bonuses so that it was hard but not impossible to achieve 100% coverage on the hardest time limit. We also introduced three levels of timer: 3 minutes; 6 minutes; 9 minutes. This provided different levels of competition to suit different players.

Well would you look at that? The timers have taken up the whole of this post. They were an important issue though, so I’ll let them off. Next time, we’ll cover another big gameplay tweak – multipliers.

Next time on Designer Blog…

• We’ll describe another big gameplay tweak – multipliers

Mike Movel – Lead Designer