[AE.Gamedev] Optimization as Gameplay: "Your character optimized in 30 minutes or less, or your run is over."
So, there's a couple of casual games I've become very interested in lately that I think might form a micro-genre together, as they are both a very specific type of game I haven't otherwise encountered and one was explicitly inspired by the other.
The later one -- the one that I became aware of first, which led me to the earlier one -- is a retro-ish pixel game on Steam called Vampire Survivors.
The loose story, such as it is, is that you are a member of a Italian family of vampire hunters (or one of their many allies; the character roster is growing at regular intervals) desperately searching for a vampire to hunt. Bats, you've got. Ghosts, zombies, ghouls, werewolves, demons, skeletons... you have so many of those. But vampires? They're a bit thin on the ground.
I call it "retro-ish" because it is from top to bottom a loving if sometimes baffling reference to classic 8 and 16 bit Castlevania games in terms of thematic and aesthetic elements, but its gameplay is like nothing from that series, or anything else I played before it.
The essence of the gameplay is incredibly simple: the only controls are movement. Attacks are done automatically at the cooldown rate of your weapon. Each character has a different starting weapon with its own attack pattern and targeting parameters, and you can collect five more of them over the course of the run.
Some of the weapons and their patterns will be familiar to Castlevania players: the whip attacks horizontally, the knife flies forward in the direction you're facing, the axe is thrown in an arc, etc.
Some of those get a bit weird in practice, as movement patterns from a side-scrolling platform game are pasted into an overhead view. The whip always attacks east and west, but enemies can come at you from north and south. The axe is tossed "up" towards the top of the screen, thus striking members of the horde coming from the north, and then falls off "down" towards the bottom of the screen, striking the horde to the south.
Other weapons will target the nearest enemy, or a random enemy somewhere on the screen, or a random area whether or not there are any enemies there, or a fixed area around the hero.
New weapons, along with an occasional choice of accessory (limit of 6 of those as well) are offered as a reward when you collect enough XP (in the form of gems dropped by some defeated enemies). You get a choice of 3 or 4 of them each time, making it a literal case of "You can't always get what you want."
Selections you made previously show up in the list as an option to upgrade them to the next level, which can improve them in all sorts of ways. You're never offered a new weapon or accessory if you don't have space for it, or if it's maxed out, and most weapons (I think the plan is eventually for it to be all weapons) has an unlockable "evolution" if you get it to max level and have an accessory that relates in some way to the evolved form.
If you're wondering how you switch between six different weapons if the only controls are movement, the answer is that you don't. Newly collected weapons are automatically processed at their own attack rate alongside the previous one, with no diminishing returns or inteference among them. As many of the weapons gain additional duplicate projectiles as they're upgraded (with more possible as a result of accessories, powerups, and individual characters' passive special abilities), by the end of a run the game resembles a reverse of the "bullet hell" genre of shooter, with your character at the center of a maze of monsters with paths carved out by the dozens of blades and blasts that are being proc'd automatically in a constant cycle.
I used the word "horde" in an earlier paragraph because that's the form the opposition takes in this game: a horde of enemies that starts as a trickle early on in a run and, if you survive long enough, eventually becomes a veritable sea of wings and claws and fangs pressing in on you from all sides.
The goal is to survive as long as you can, with the run being "won" 30 minutes in when Death himself shows up to claim you. Accomplishing various feats and milestones along the way unlocks more characters, more weapons, more options, etc., and money picked up over the course of your runs can be used to buy permanent powerups to damage, speed, attack rate, etc.
I first saw this game on a YouTube channel, Secret Sleepover Society, where a pair of streamers (Julia and Jacob from the now-indie College Humor-spinoff YouTube show Drawfee) post the on-demand archives of their Twitch streams.
They only played it for a fraction of a stream because of the repetitive nature of the game, but I was enthralled by the deceptively simple gameplay and by the time they completed their run, I had purchased the game (in early access on Steam) for the princely sum of $2.99 -- that's the current regular price, not a sale price -- and was an avid player.
The other game in this mold is called Magic Survival, and I found out about it reading discussion of Vampire Survivors, and the first thing I learned about it is that it's a mobile game, which made so much about the gameplay make sense.
Magic Survival is a mobile arcade-action game that was designed from top to bottom to be fully playable with just one hand, which is amazing for me as I tend to need another hand to support/steady a mobile device if I'm playing a game on it.
It's free to play, supported by ads. If you pay to turn off the ads (one-time fee, not subscription), you get one free revival the first time you die in each run. Without that premium unlock, you can only do the revival if there's an ad in the queue you haven't seen yet.
I bought the ad-free version because I've played the game fully long enough to know the developer deserves my support.
Magic Survival's plot is about as thin as that of Vampire Survivors: there was a technologically advanced and magical civilization, magical viruses mutated and wiped out that civilization, and you are controlling a little homonculus that gets sent into the ruins of the world-that-was to collect magical research material.
The homonculus accrues spells (mostly attacks) and skills (minor buffs) in the same way that the vampire hunters collect weapons, and can get artifacts that boost those spells from treasure chests. There is no limit to the number of spells that can be collected and used in a run, but there's a balancing act in that each new spell you learn has the same opportunity cost of leveling up another spell, and so the more spells you have, the lower level they'll all be.
Which gets into one of the reasons why I find these game so compelling. You might think games that present you with an endless and ever-growing horde of enemies who will fill every inch of the screen they can would be a strenuous test of reflexes via "twitch gameplay", but by and large, these games not only don't test the player's response time, the relentless nature of the endless horde doesn't give much room for response time to mater very often.
By the time you reach the "deep end" of a 30 minute run in either game, you're mostly winning or losing on the strength of the decisions you made 5, 10, and 20 minutes ago. You can make tactical decisions like moving to engage or flee from a recently spawned boss or other big monster, but how quickly you can cut a path through the swarm is going to depend on what kind of firepower your character is throwing out and how often.
There are some "builds" in Vampire Survivors where you can spend the final few minutes of a run confidently standing in place while the combined power of a protective garlic aura and various weapons and magical artifacts lay waste to anything that dares approach you, and there are some that require you to stay on your toes to move around a little bit in order to concentrate the fire in one direction after another and also pick up enough XP gems from fallen foes to earn an occasional healing bite of the game's signature dish, Floor Chicken... by and large, if you make it to the end of a run without a viable build, then no, you didn't.
In short, the thing I like about these two games -- which I've seen described as "rogue-like survival games", meaning a game that consists of discrete runs where the goal is to survive as long as you can -- is that to a considerable degree, the metagame is the game.
Meaning that you win by learning how the game elements work and figuring out how they can best work together. There are whole genres of games based around the optimization of operations (many games featuring some form of the word "factory" in the title), and any game that allows for customization of a character's capabilities and/or equipment has room for optimizaton of the character, but in these games, the optimization is the foundation of the actual gameplay in a way I've never experienced with an action game before.
It's possible that Magic Survival is just one iteration of a well-worn genre of mobile games that had escaped my notice because I don't do much mobile gaming, but even if it was the very first game in this mold, I would be surprised if more games don't follow in its path.
The combination of very simple elements (very simple controls, very simple animations and designs, very simple enemy AI) with very deep gameplay (combination of temporary attacks for the current run, buffs for the current run, artifacts/accessories for the current run, and permanently unlocked characters/classes and power-ups)... there's so much potential there, and the games' steadily ramping level of challenge punctuated by frequent choices of rewards really hits a sweet spot for engagement and a state of flow, while the bounded nature of the game makes it feel very manageable.
The whole thing is very appealing to me, given my love of games with intricate, interlocking systems but my relatively limited coding skills. I've been tinkering with a prototype of a rogue-like survival game in the vein of those two, at first using sprites ripped from NES games and then purely abstract geometry as placeholders for the enemies while I worked out what theme to put on it.
I don't know that it will go anywhere -- see again, limited coding skills -- but playing within the bounds of the limited gameplay conventions is a fun exercise.