A ‘behind the scenes’ look at Confetti Carnival’s development process

In this post I’ll take a closer look at the actual gameplay mechanics (with some new footage) of Confetti Carnival and share my thoughts on an issue that we’re dealing with for a long time.

I’ll start by teasing with a little video showing 5 different ways of getting bombs in Confetti Carnival. We’ll get back to that video later on so you might wanna watch it again after your done reading.

Watch HD version on Youtube

A little background on the game

Before I go into things, I need a few words to explain the core concepts of the game to those who haven’t played it yet (which is almost everyone, since the game is still in development).

In Confetti Carnival, each round (of each level) introduces a group of blobs called Splatters and a set of Confetti Bombs. Your goal is destroy all the Confetti bombs on stage using the Splatters your given to play with. The way you destroy the bombs involve flinging your Splatters onto walls and watching them break up and spill their liquid. When bombs are washed by liquid they ignite and explode into confetti.

You play each Splatter at a time. You just point in the right direction and hit the ‘Slam’ button – the rest of the action is performed by physics simulation and learning to anticipate it is part of the skill the player needs to hone.
As the simulation unfolds the player can intervene at any time by hitting the ‘Flip’ button. What it does is reverse the motion of the entire scene (Splatters, bombs, liquid … everything!). This, turns out, is a very powerful and yet simple way of manipulating the simulation and players will consistently find new scenarios where it comes in handy. On top of that there is a cool (in my opinion) stunt and combo system that rewards shots that are more challenging, stylish or otherwise impressive.

Designing for different play-styles

Our design was aimed to enable players to ‘choose’ how intensely they want to play it. They can take their time carefully considering each shot or just go ballistic on it and try to clear the entire round (or even an entire level) with a very long combo of moves. This was mostly achieved by two main design decisions:

1. There is no time limit on rounds/levels at all.
2. If you wait for too long between stunts (~3 seconds) the current stunt combo will end (and score multiplier resets).

Pretty standard stuff, but what we are seeing so far, is that most players start by playing it slowly, which is expected since the game has quite original game mechanics. What we’re trying to do now, is slowly push players towards playing faster and doing longer stunt combos. When you try and achieve long combo strings, you need to play faster and adopt a more ‘reactive’ play-style where you roughly aim your shot and then use the ‘Flip’ and ’2nd shot’ mechanics to correct your move as needed. But that’s not the whole story – the rational behind our combo system is to deliberately make shots to generate more stunts even if the ‘easiest’ way to clear the round is more direct.

… Continue reading …