So we’ve been talking about the gameplay tweaks we made to Chime to get it ready for release after its long journey through the creative ether. We’ve dealt with the two biggest changes – to timers and to multipliers. Now we’ll cover all the other bits and bobs – we’ve got a lot to get through, so off we go…

Effects, Effects, Effects!

We’ve touched on this before, but it’s an important point. There are a lot of hidden depths to Chime, and the gameplay is potentially quite complex. We wanted every bit of the game to be as clear to the player as possible so that you guys can spend time developing strategies and exploring the game (and trying to beat my score – ha, no chance!) rather than working out what’s going on. To this end, while keeping the graphics simple and stylish, we’ve tried to make all of the effects eye-catching and meaningful. So for example, if you get some points for a quad getting stamped down, the quad explodes in a cloud of particles and the score flies off and up to the UI.

Feedback

Feedback of players success, failure, score and time are vital in Chime. There was much time thought and energy put into all areas of the game that required feedback. I talked about multipliers last time and mentioned the stack as a way of providing feedback. This piece of HUD (as we like to call it in the trade) looks simple and easy to understand but to get to that point was a relatively lengthy process. The information had to be understandable at a glance. At first we just showed a number but it was too subtle, so we tried vertical stacks, horizontal stacks with numerical systems and at one point a funny sausage looking thing that filled up. All these approaches had their issues but trying them all out resulted in the simple and clear bit of design we have today.

The Game Structure

We wanted to make Chime as open-ended and replayable as possible. We introduced an unlocking structure to keep you peeps on your toes and make things exciting, and we also made the coverage theoretically unlimited – fill up the grid, and it gets wiped allowing you to crank up your coverage past 100%. Finally we put much more emphasis than before on winning the coverage, and we reckon that it’s a real incentive to keep coming back for more – there were at least a couple of emails a day along the lines of “Ha! In your face! 212% on the Moby level… eat my pentominoes, fool!”

Level Shape and Shape Sets

We played around with weird level shapes, and I made one into a face. Tee hee. We also introduced new types of shapes on each level, and took some away. Both of these things really made a difference to how each level plays and how best to beat it. Many shapes didn’t make the cut, some were simply too difficult but perhaps down the line there will be desire for a hardcore level and we can bring those intriguing shapes back.

Balancing the Game

This is potentially the trickiest part of game design. Once everything’s in, you need to make sure it all fits together, plays nicely and is just the right level of difficulty. You normally don’t have that much time, ‘cause the game’s nearly finished, and on top of that you’ve been playing it constantly for months and you know all the ins and outs, so it’s often quite hard to judge how difficult other people will find it. From watching quite a few people play the game since, though, I’m hopeful we’ve got the balance right, but you guys will be the judge of that. Let us know what you think!

Next time on Designer Blog…

• The last designer blog!
• We talk about the challenges of getting the game on to Xbox LIVE

Mike Movel – Lead Designer