When I was trying to decide which game to deconstruct next, I listed the games I’ve been playing the most recently. Then I pulled out my phone to send a text message and Robot Unicorn Attack stared back at me. I stopped playing just long enough to write this article.

Robot Unicorn Attack

Developer: Adult Swim Games
Platform: Browser (link) / iPhone
Genre: Imaginary
Metacritic: N/A
Price: Free / $2.99 (iPhone)

Robot Unicorn Attack is a completely unoriginal game that managed to be better than its source material in just about every way. It clearly followed the example of indie darling Cannabalt, which is still a great game on its own. Whereas Cannabalt’s audience was limited to the hardcore gaming community, Robot Unicorn Attack made the gameplay more complex and found a much larger audience (over 27 million players according to the developer). It’s a rare failure of the K.I.S.S. principle. What’s so magical about this game?

Gameplay
The objective of Robot Unicorn Attack is to live as long as possible. The game instructs the player to “make your wishes come true” at the beginning of each round, with the subsequent reminder that “you will die.” The core gameplay consists of jumping, double jumping, and dashing from across floating platforms as the unicorn automatically runs to the right. The player’s score increases at a rate that grows every 5,000 points, and additional points can be earned by running into fairies or dashing through star-shaped rocks. The wish ends in a fiery explosion when the player runs into a wall, falls off the map, or hits a star without dashing.

The two button gameplay (jumping or dashing) is deceivingly deep. The player’s success or failure depends on the timing of each jump or knowing when to double jump over an obstacle versus dash under it. The game’s increasing speed makes reacting to each obstacle even more difficult. The camera can be problematic, and I still find myself occasionally blaming the game for randomly spawning a platform with an unfairly placed star on it when I crash, but I’m still steadily improving my scores.

Asthetics
IGN has praised Robot Unicorn Attack as “the best Erasure song you’ve ever played,”and it’s true that most of the game’s character comes from its soundtrack. The sci-fi sounds of jet boosters and explosions combined with the synthpop love ballad is extremely memorable in every way you don’t want it to be. Players find themselves humming the song for hours after they play.

The game’s art style mirrors the sound design with Michael Bay-worthy explosions set against platforms of purple grass and rainbows that could have come straight out of a My Little Pony cartoon. The ironic pairing of things that don’t belong together wouldn’t mean anything without the gameplay depth, but it makes the game a guilty pleasure to play.

The comparison to Cannabalt is a great reminder that game design only goes so far: production value and execution made this game the viral success that it is.

Replayability
Take away the music and there’s a key difference between Robot Unicorn Attack and it source material that makes it all that much more addictive: the combination of three wishes. If you have a great run in Cannabalt, you can share it and brag to your friends. If you have a great run in Robot Unicorn Attack, that’s nice, but it doesn’t matter unless your other two runs are just as good. The combined total of all three runs is the only score that gets recorded.

Players can find this annoying, but it actually serves as a way of making them come back to play more often. It eliminates blind luck from earning them high scores and rewards talent and practice. It effectively makes the game three times as challenging as it otherwise could be without changing the gameplay at all. The result is the most meaningful use of “submit a score to Facebook” that I know of.

Conclusion
A friend of mine referred to Robot Unicorn Attack as ”the perfect Flash game,” and I’m inclined to agree. It takes less than five minutes to play, but it rewards players who come back. The soundtrack gets stuck in players’ heads and lures them back to play more. Players aren’t afraid to share their scores over Facebook because high scores actually seem like an accomplishment instead of a cheap ploy to get more people playing.

This month I take a look at another downloadable title, this time for the PlayStation 3. I briefly played PixelJunk Shooter at E3, and although I was impressed with its visual style and ease of use, I didn’t know how long the game would be able to keep my attention with its simple mechanics. I picked it up based on the developer’s reputation for quality, and although it was a bit on the short side, it does a lot of things very well.

PixelJunk Shooter

Developer: Q Games
Genre: Shooter / Puzzle
Metacritic: 86
Price: $9.99
Length: 4-6 hours

Background
PixelJunk Shooter is the fourth entry in the Q Games’ PixelJunk series of PSN titles, following most recently the critically acclaimed PixelJunk Eden. It follows suit with the series’ reputation for high production value and polish. On the surface, the game isn’t very special – it’s a space-cavern exploration adventure along the lines of Subterrania for the Sega Genesis (I feel like this dates me), but its puzzle design is so innovative that it creates a very fresh experience. Its difficulty stems from its fluid-based physics puzzles, all of which force the player to think carefully about every move. The game isn’t particularly difficult, but it’s extremely clever.

Gameplay
Shooter consists of three worlds that have roughly five levels each. Each level is broken up into a handful of areas where  a handful of crew members from the ERS Piñita Colada have been stranded. The player is tasked with rescuing all of the survivors in each area, without letting more than five die during the course of a level. All survivors must be rescued or killed (no one gets left behind) before access to the next area until the the final area is reached, where an escape gate opens to leave the level. The player cannot backtrack to areas they have completed without replaying the entire level. In the final area of each world, the player encounters a boss that must be defeated to continue on to the next world.

The player’s health is displayed on a heat gauge at the bottom of the screen. As the ship takes damages or flies around magma, it gets warmer. If it gets too hot, it stalls out or explodes. The ship’s temperature gradually decreases when it is far away from hazards, and it cools off instantly when submersed in water.

The player’s deaths are not tracked – if you die at any time during a level, you start back at the beginning of the area. The only way to fail a level is to allow the lost survivor counter to reach five. The player can earn 1-UPs during the game that subtract one from that counter. If the player restarts an area after accidentally killing a survivor, the survivor will reappear in the level but the penalty for losing him does not reset.

The entire game is also playable in co-op mode. Playing with a friend almost completely eliminates the penalty for failure because it’s rare for both players to die at once. After dying in co-op mode, it only takes five seconds to respawn. The level only ends if both players die, meaning if one player can stay alive, it’s as if the death never happened.

The level select screen goes deeper and deeper into the cavern as you progress through the game.

Mechanics
Although rescuing survivors and collecting diamonds are the primary objectives, the meat of the game is found in manipulating various fluids. There are multiple kinds of fluids and gasses, and the player can move them around the level by blasting apart the rock that holds them back in each area’s caverns. As the game progresses, the player learns a system of rules for how fluids interact with each other that become the basis for most of the game’s puzzles:

• Water mixed with magma yields solid ground
• Water mixed with oil yields gas
• Water mixed with ice yields ice
• Magma ignites gas
• Magma melts ice
• Magma evaporates oil

Flying near magma or flying through gas slowly heats up the ship. Flying into magma or oil usually results in an instant death. The player must also consider how the fluids affect the survivors: they can survive forever in water or a short time in gas, but they instantly die in lava or oil. They can also get trapped in ice and freeze to death.

In some areas, the player will be able to use a dock to temporarily change the ship’s functionality via Metroid-esque “suits.” They might change the ship’s primary fire to shooting water or lava instead of missiles, or they might change how the suit interacts with the environment (i.e. reversing effects of water and lava). Each suit lends itself towards a particular type of puzzle, but they have downsides as well. The Water Suit is great for neutralizing lava or creating ice walls, but it takes away the player’s ability to attack most enemies because it can only shoot water or pull away chunks of ice with the grapple. The Magma Suit is powerful for melting ice and killing most enemies quickly, but it’s easy for players to accidentally shoot themselves with magma that gets deflected from walls and it can make navigating through gas very dangerous. One exception is the “Anti-Magnet” suit that repels the magnetic oil substance found in the later levels – allowing the player to guide the fluid around simply by flying near or through it. It’s a lot of fun to use, but it’s overpowered compared to the other suits because there isn’t a downside to using it since the ship retains all of its normal abilities. I felt like the second world was harder than the final one as a result.

Once a suit is equipped, there is no way to discard it until the area is completed. Suits reset at the beginning of each area, and there is never more than one suit available in any given area. Part of me feels like this is an obvious missed opportunity, but I also realize that it keeps thing simple. As it stands, the player can never get stuck to a point where the level must be reset, and it would likely be easier to reach a dead end when combining the abilities of each suit. That’s a good thing, but I still wish the game had more puzzles that played on the weaknesses of each suit. I found that I had to think the hardest when I was worried about dying more than when I was trying to get to an exit, and most of the suit puzzles minimize those situations.

Sometimes, the grapple is used to open doors like this one.

Aesthetics
The game uses a simplistic cel-shaded style similar to the other titles in the PixelJunk series. It lends itself particularly well to the fluid animations. At first I was a little bit confused about which kinds of surfaces I could shoot through because there isn’t much difference in their appearances aside from shading, but I quickly adapted to the game’s world and didn’t have any trouble after the first couple of levels. Then again, I was lucky enough to be playing on a massive HDTV in 1080p, so it might be a bit more difficult to see with a poor contrast ratio on a standard tube TV. The characters (enemies, ships, bosses) have minimal animation, but they still manage to feel alive in the context of the game. The style is nothing revolutionary, but it works well and I have a hard time picturing this game without it.

The game’s soundtrack is made up of the series’ trademark smooth electronic beats. There’s some subtle procedural music alteration during particular events in the game. When the player is engaged in combat, the percussion track goes from ambient to driving. It helps create a sense of urgency for dealing with enemies without being intrusive or jarring like a flashy graphical effect could be.

If you’ve played other PixelJunk games, Shooter’s aesthetics will be instantly familiar but they come across as far more polished than its predecessors.

This gas was ignited by lava, and it will blow up the pillars of ice trapping the survivors on the left.

Controls
The player moves his spaceship around with the left stick and changes its orientation with the right stick. Spinning the right stick performs a spin-attack that can dig away soil or deflect enemy fire. Either of the right triggers can be used to fire the currently equipped weapon, and holding down one of the right triggers operates as a secondary fire. The left triggers fire the grapple used to pick up items or survivors. None of the face buttons are used during gameplay.

Without its simple controls, the game would quickly over-complicate itself. The ship’s movement is just floaty enough to match the game’s outer-space setting, but it’s tight enough so that the player doesn’t blame the game for running into hazards. There is a very slight auto-aim correction on the primary fire, but I was only frustrated with myself (not the game) when stray bullets hit survivors.

The biggest gripe I have with the controls is the lack of a good tutorial. There are “how to play” slides available for viewing before the game, but like most players, I jumped in and figured I’d learn as I go. As a result, I was stuck for about 30 minutes on one level trying to figure out how to pass an obstacle when the solution was to spin-attack through it. I had never needed it before, and I was well past halfway through the game, so I simply didn’t know about the spin-attack ability. A playable tutorial of some sort is a necessity in almost any game when the controls aren’t self-explanatory – even overlays that explain the controls during the main game would have been sufficient, but it’s not right to assume the player will read a boring set of slides before jumping into the action.

Another frustration is the lack of a decent camera for the co-op mode. If one player moves off the screen into a secret area or proceeds to the exit, the other player is instantly transported there. Similarly, player two will die  via a Sonic the Hedgehog 2 drowning-style countdown timer if player one goes too far away. Perhaps a dynamic splitscreen system could have solved the problem?

Where’s the Fun?
This is the classic example of a game being better than the sum of all its parts. The gameplay is simple enough to be easy to pick up and play with a friend, but complex enough to avoid turning into a collect-a-thon. There’s very little change in difficulty, but there’s a lot of depth to the game’s puzzles (pun intended) and it makes you feel clever every step of the way even if there isn’t any sort of real penalty for failure. That lack of a fail state allows the game to offer a large variety of puzzles without getting too frustrating.

Watching the fluids interact with the world is a treat in itself.

The game also does an excellent job of giving the player feedback for every action. I  think it’s what made Uncharted 2 such a success, but on a smaller scale: even if the player is on a linear path, the game can fabricate an exhilarating experience by making players feel like they have a tangible impact on everything in the world. Shooter gets away with it by maximizing the use of its fluid animations. The player has minimal control over the fluids, but that limited influence has massive amounts of feedback because of the various ways the fluids can interact. The player feels directly responsible for every cool chemical reaction and every pretty visual effect.

Similar to PixelJunk Eden, the game displays the number of remaining collectibles in each level to encourage completionism. Survivors re-appear on each playthrough, but the diamonds do not. At first I was aggravated that I was going to have to redo all the puzzles and get each survivor all over again if I wanted to find every diamond I missed on my first playthrough, but then I realized that collecting every diamond would be a boring challenge if the game was stripped of its puzzles. Then I found out that on subsequent playthroughs, the game also enables a time-trial challenge with an online leaderboard. On paper, these features are obvious and certainly nothing innovative, but they add a good deal of replayability to an otherwise short game.

What’s Next?
Q Games has already announced that they’re working on PixelJunk Shooter 2, a very uncharacteristic move for a team that hasn’t made a sequel before. The EP, Dylan Cuthbert, says that the team was able to get all their big ideas into the first game during development, but there were still a lot left on the drawing board. I’m looking forward to see where they take it – PixelJunk Shooter is a lot of fun, but there’s also a lot of untapped potential.

When I decided I was going to do these deconstructions, Facebook games were the last thing on my mind. This time last month, I had never even played a Facebook game. I thought the very concept of Facebook games was backwards – I have Steam to play games on my computer, after all. Facebook should be strictly for staying in touch with friends. But after hearing that FarmVille has over 11 million active users on a daily basis – even more than World of Warcraft - I figured that there must be something about the game that the average Facebook user finds attractive. And in always trying to expand my knowledge of games, I finally gave in and started playing.

FarmVille

Developer: Zynga
Genre: Simulation
Metacritic: N/A
Price: Free / Optional Microtransactions
Length: Indeterminate

Background
FarmVille is Zynga’s answer to Farmtown, another popular farm simulator for social networks.

Gameplay
FarmVille is designed to be played in short segments of five to ten minutes every day. It’s a never-ending cycle of planting crops, waiting for crops to grow in real-time overnight or throughout the day, and then harvesting the crops before they whither. The objective of the game is highly open-ended, but players can progress by gaining experience points and “leveling up.” Each level unlocks a new set of crops for players to plant worth more than the previous ones.

The game uses two types of currency: “coins” and “farm cash.” Players earn coins by planting and harvesting crops, but farm cash is much harder to come by. To get more than one farm dollar per day, a player has to spend real money through Zynga’s payment system. In the in-game marketplace, some things can only be bought with coins, some things can only be bought with farm cash, and others can be bought with either.

Players can also earn “ribbons” (achievements) that reward them with coins, experience points, and gifts. There are four tiers for each ribbon, each more demanding than the previous. For example, the criteria for one ribbon might be “earn 10,000 coins.” The next tier for that ribbon could be “earn 100,000 coins.” The game keeps track of the player’s progress by offering helpful counters such as “only 2,460 coins to go.”

Being on Facebook, FarmVille taps into the social networking bug and lets players send gifts to each other for free and “help” each others’ farms by visiting and clicking a button to scare away crows or rake up leaves that litter the fields. The game tries to make players invite more friends to join at every turn, whether it’s through publishing updates to the Facebook news feed or sending explicit invites through Facebook’s notification system. As players make “neighbors” (or FarmVille friends) with their Facebook friends, they are able to build bigger farms. It’s worth noting that players cannot see anyone on FarmVille who isn’t already one of their Facebook friends, so it does not act as a tool to meet new people like many other online games.

Where’s the fun?
There is nothing particularly innovative about FarmVille’s gameplay, but it still manages to attract millions of players. Obviously, then,  there has to be something more going on here than just a stripped-down copy of Harvest Moon. What keeps players coming back? I think we can learn the most from FarmVille from breaking down how users interact with the game.

I can think of a couple possible answers. For me, a competitive Counter-Strike, Starcraft, and Rock Band player, I felt the need to level up faster than my friends to illustrate my farm’s superiority. I also fell into the achievement-whore mentality, playing just one more day to earn the next ribbon and see what I would unlock. I consider this to be the traditional or “hardcore” gamer’s approach to FarmVille.

The other answer, which I witnessed on some of my friends’ farms, is to play the game more like the decoration-centric approach to The Sims. Whereas my farm was almost entirely filled with plowed land and rows of trees, some farms I viewed were full of animals, ponds, houses, and haystacks.

Example of what I call a "casual" farm

Example of what I call a "hardcore" farm.

For someone playing the unwinnable game to win, wasting space like this is absurd. To gain the most experience points and the most coins, the farm should be full of top-grossing crops, save for a little bit of room for trees and animals to work towards the ribbons you can earn for harvesting them. For someone who isn’t a traditional or hardcore gamer, though, the game takes on a different goal where experience points are merely a byproduct of enjoying the game at a slower pace. This is a “casual” approach to FarmVille, where players have fun by exploring what the game has to offer – as a sandbox of sorts, not by working towards arbitrary goals in hopes of being rewarded.

Lasting Appeal
I played FarmVille for almost four weeks before quitting. I am a level 23 farmer with just over 100,000 coins in the bank. I can buy just about anything in the game’s virtual store. But I noticed that most of my friends’ stopped playing after a while, and as a result, the challenge of leveling up the fastest sort of fell apart. The game caps at level 70, but I don’t have any desire to go any further.

12 million players does not make a game an MMO, yet many of FarmVille’s hardcore players seem to treat it as such. Leveling up in an MMO is fun because of the social interaction with other players. That social aspect is so limited in FarmVille that it cannot sustain gameplay, so while MMO players can look back on their hours of gaming with fond memories, FarmVille players are left with a bad aftertaste. The variation of gameplay is somewhat greater than FarmVille’s offerings in even the most vanilla of MMOs. As farms get larger, the game degrades to clicking every single patch of land on the screen three times: once to harvest a crop, once to plow the fallow land the crop leaves behind, and once to plant the seeds of a new crop in its place. When I quit playing, my farm was 18×18 tiles large, meaning I found myself clicking around the screen a total of 972 times in a period of 10 minutes to complete a day’s worth of farming – not including time spent to collect eggs from chickens or fruit from trees, or to re-arrange animals and fences to get ribbons. It’s not fun, but it’s the fastest way to level up.

Is this really fun?

In the Gamasutra article I linked to at the top of this post, one of the commenters quipped “It seems you win Zynga games when you realize they aren’t really games and quit. the lower level you are, the better you did.” I think this was true for me, and possibly for many hardcore or traditional gamers, but it’s wrong to assume it’s always the case:  some of my friends who I grouped into the “casual” category are still playing almost daily. They aren’t leveling up as quickly, but they seem to be re-arranging their farms a few times per week, exchanging gifts with friends, and rescuing lost sheep to their hearts’ content. If these types of players are still farming, then the game is a success for them.

Building a Better Farm
Being a “free Facebook app” is an excuse to some extent, but if a game that relies on a “five minutes per day” play attraction fails to keep a significant part of its audience interested after a few weeks of play, there’s a design failure happening somewhere. FarmVille is still in beta, and towards the end of my time playing the game, Zynga added a new RPG-element in allowing each individual crop to “level up” in terms of proficiency. I think this seems like a move geared towards the hardcore audience, but I’m not convinced it addresses the issue. FarmVille could benefit from more social elements, such as cooperative farming or teams working towards a goal. Players should be able to buy and sell crops from each other to earn high-grossing crops before their levels unlock them.

These types social elements in browser-based games are already a proven success. Cybernations, for example, has minimal graphical elements and shares FarmVille’s philosophy of gaming in five-minutes-a-day. Some people play it as such. The game’s “hardcore” audience, however, spends hours a week in the game’s forums engaged in foreign relations issues with other teams or alliances. Cybernations‘ ultimate failure is in allowing this battle of alliances take over the game – unaligned players are always at risk being attacked because no one will step up to defend them, and being a member of an alliance is demanding of much more time than many players are willing to invest. In terms of FarmVille, the game needs to offer hardcore gamers a way of playing for more than five minutes a day while still giving them a purpose. The most compelling reason to play these games, at least as far as I have seen, is to be a part of a team working towards a goal that players cannot attain by themselves.

Finding an Audience
Facebook has over 300 million users worldwide. 12 million of those users are playing FarmVille. It’s a big number, but it’s only 4%. By contrast, there have been about 32 million Xbox 360s sold worldwide. 8 million of those Xbox 360 owners, or about 25%, own Call of Duty 4. It’s clear that Facebook games have a long way to go before they reach the relative appeal of the most popular console games.  Not everyone on Facebook plays games, but not everyone who plays FarmVille is a gamer. Many gamers on Facebook won’t play games on Facebook. Why?

I realize that Facebook and the Xbox 360 don’t exactly have the same target audience, and Xbox 360 owners are more likely to play games even though they have to pay money for them. But look at the iPhone – a device for a broad audience where games have consistently topped the list of most-downloaded applications. There’s something that FarmVille or Facebook itself is doing wrong where a barrier to entry is being created.

For me, the barrier was installing the app to my profile. When apps were first introduced, they were intrusive and annoying. I hate having my news feed overwhelmed by silly apps my friends are using that I don’t care about. As a result, I always deny apps access to my profile when they ask. My decision to start playing FarmVille changed that habbit a bit, but I’m still more hesitant about installing an app to Facebook than I am to installing an app to my iPhone, despite the former being a much easier process overall.

Summary
The Good: Extremely easy to learn, fully playable with minimal time investment, free.

The Bad: Sometimes too simplistic for hardcore audiences, limited social interaction.

I realize this decon was probably a lot longer than it needed to be. Hopefully you can learn from it. I would advise any developers out there who haven’t tried FarmVille to give it a shot – everything points to these types of games playing a bigger role in the future of our medium. If you’ve already played it, please share your thoughts with me in the comments below – there’s only so much I can deconstruct on my own!

]]> http://holdenlink.com/2009/10/game-deconstruction-farmville/feed/ 8 http://holdenlink.com/2009/09/game-deconstruction-splosion-man/ http://holdenlink.com/2009/09/game-deconstruction-splosion-man/#comments Sat, 05 Sep 2009 06:55:03 +0000 Holden http://holdenlink.com/?p=430 More >]]> Here’s a concept I picked up from my room mates over the summer who interned at Pandemic Studios. Every week, one member of the team would pick a game and give a presentation on its strengths and weaknesses. There’s a lot to be learned about design by paying attention to the details that many players may overlook at first glance.

As a personal experiment, I’m challenging myself to do one “game decon” every month for the next year. It’s one way I think I can work to make myself a better designer while providing some interesting reading material. I’ll try to not just pick “good” games, but this week I’ll start with one of my recent favorites…

‘Splosion Man

Developer: Twisted Pixel
Genre: Platformer
Metacritic: 85
Price: 800 Microsoft Moon Dollars ($10 USD)
Length: 4-10 hours

Background
‘Splosion Man was conceived by Twisted Pixel’s lead designer, Sean Riley, as a game about “a guy who splodes in a world only made of glass.” The team started production in the middle of developing The Maw, their first original title. The game puts the player in control of a strange man-creature who “splodes” all the time without explanation. The game is controlled with the joystick and one button (which makes the character explode). The game’s plot is nearly non-existent, but the little story it offers is derived from its setting in the labs of the evil “Big Science” corporation.

I’ve always been a sucker for good XBLA games, but ‘Splosion Man might be the best yet. I’ve told a few people that I think it’s the best game since Portal. After finishing up the single player game and getting about halfway through the co-op, I still feel like it’s at least the most satisfying gameplay experience since exploring Aperture Science. Both games take place in laboratories, and both games showcase cake as the ultimate object of desire. Twisted Pixel makes the homage obvious.

Gameplay
‘Splosion Man features 50 single player levels, 50 co-op levels, and 3 boss battles. The core goal of the game is to use timing and skill to cross obstacles and reach the safe room at the end of each level. Puzzle elements rely almost exclusively on wall jumping and using exploding barrels for propulsion, but it’s the player’s timing of those elements that adds complexity to the game as it progresses.

The puzzle design in ‘Splosion Man is significantly better than any platformer I’ve played in the past decade and every bit as good as the test chambers of Portal. Solutions are creative and often brilliant, yet  usually obvious. I never found myself blaming the game when I failed a level – I always knew exactly what I did wrong, and although it was occasionally frustrating, the sense of accomplishment when I finally had a successful attempt was well worth it.

The co-op gameplay in particular is wonderfully fresh. It’s impossible to progress through a level without working with your teammate(s), and there’s no advantage to doing “better” than the other players. For the most part, it’s easy to pick up and play with a friend because of the intuitive one button mechanic, but the complexity of the puzzles begins to rivals those in the single player version towards the end.

The boss battles are a nice change of pace, but unlike the rest of the game, they are beaten largely by trial-and-error. I felt like I had to die before I even had a chance at getting it right, and as a result they were my least favorite part of the experience. Fortunately, though, there are only three of them!

Accessibility
Especially after listening to accessibility complaints about my games, I have a great deal of respect for developers who make intuitive tutorials. My respect for Twisted Pixel is even greater, because they managed to make a game that doesn’t need a tutorial. As shown in this video of the first level, they throw the player into the action with no backstory and no explanation whatsoever.

How did they do this? The intro cutscene is just 11 seconds long, yet it explains everything you need to know about the game. You are a crazy man who explodes. Scientists are scared of you. When you splode out of your cell, you kill a scientist and look happily onward at the other one who runs for his life. Then you have control. Because it’s funny to see yourself explode, you do it. And pressing any of the face buttons will do just that. Twisted Pixel assumes that the player has a brain – after all, they were able to purchase the game off Xbox Live Arcade – and therefore makes the assumption that they will be willing to experiment with the gameplay rather than forcing a step-by-step tutorial.

Affordances of the 2.5D Camera
‘Splosion Man is controlled entirely in a 2D plane, but the developer’s use of unconventional camera angles captured my interest. Playing the game with co-workers at EA, I noticed some players were annoyed with the camera and blamed it for their deaths. Others didn’t mention it, but talked about how the game made them feel awesome.

There are some areas where the camera goes a little bit crazy and that can be annoying – particularly when you backtrack and the game doesn’t expect it. At the same time, it creates immersion in a 2D world. Subtle tilts that focus on the character’s expressions are common and feel so natural that they go unnoticed after a while, but the camera quickly pans around while zooming in and out during certain sequences to create a layer of chaos on top of the exploding man. Leaving the camera with a pure 2D view simply wouldn’t have been as effective in supporting the game’s mood.

Sense of Humor
‘Splosion Man’s charm is also rather Portal-esque. Scientists explode into steaks, shattering glass creates heavenly bell tones, and  a finding the hidden cake in every level results in a triumph of childish joy. There’s something inherently funny about a character who runs around and explodes “just because,” but Twisted Pixel’s ability to express so much emotion through him in absence of plot is remarkable. Destructoid’s Ashley Davis wrote a great article about game’s use of idle animations – a touch that is often overlooked in modern games. ‘Splosion Man will run around with his arms stretched out making airplane noises, giggle and laugh at every turn, make pop culture references without being cheesy, and use fat donut-eating scientists as shields for laser turrets along his way out of the Big Science facility.

The game’s marketing campaign further illustrates the developer’s excellent sense of humor. Check out this viral video in the style of a really bad 80’s inspirational ballad, featuring a live-action rendition of the character:

When you ’splode it lifts me higher
as I soar on wings on fire
You’re the bro that I have chosen
’cause you’re the ’splode beneath my ’splosion

Sound Design
‘Splosion Man’s music is jazzy and upbeat all the way through. The developer has released the entire soundtrack for free on their website if you care to give it a listen. It suits the mood of the game quite well. In-game, it makes subtle use of procedural music alteration. When you’re running around at a leisurely pace, you hear trumpets and pianos twiddling along with the melody. When you’re exploding, they change into a grungy electric guitar. It’s something most players probably won’t even notice, but it added another layer of depth to the game for me. The change in music makes the game feel more intense while you fly through the air, timing jumps from wall to wall and barrel to barrel. But when you’re standing around or running and laughing at the character’s animations, the music goes right back to being happy. It serves to reinforce the other aspect’s of the game’s presentation.

What’s Next?
Twisted Pixel just announced their third original title, “Comic Jumper,” at the Penny Arcade Expo. It appears to be a side scrolling platformer/shooter and maintains the comedic tone of The Maw and ‘Splosion Man.

Summary
The Good: Easy to learn, hard to master. Hilariously wacky. Great value for ten bucks. Decent replayability. High production values. Excellent music.

The Bad: Occasionally frustrating levels. Huge difficulty spikes. Questionable UI design.

That’s it for this decon. I hope you enjoyed it, and please share your thoughts on the game below!