The Seed
Every game idea starts out with a seed – some flash of inspiration, some spark. Maybe it’s a mechanic, or an art style, a character or a new constraint. The seed for Influence, as with many of my personal projects, came from a beautiful natural algorithm applet in Processing. During the ‘seed’ phase, I find that the idea is as vulnerable as it is exhilarating. Talking to the wrong person, or even just having your thoughts interrupted, can scatter the seed across your mind, sometimes irreparably. For me, the key was to take the Processing applet and just explore – let the seed grow for awhile without the pesticide of my UI design training or practical limitations cutting in.
The very first iteration of “Influence” was actually styled after the Matrix. I discovered this flocking algorithm – the most typical “Port Boids to Processing” applet out there, and started thinking about the power a single boid possessed. A few variable tweaks later and I had “Neo” – a lone white boid who would follow the mouse cursor in addition to obeying his flocking algorithm, and “Mr. Smith” – a black boid. Either of these two, if they were the greatest force acting on another boid for at least one second, would assimilate that boid and turn it their own color.
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The first time I played and lost I remember a sort of chill terror as I watched the otherwise purple and pastel colored boids darken, like mechanical parasites. The assimilation was viral, and it was throat clenching when my Neo, surrounded by the black, was finally and deftly snuffed out. Even after my interaction was cut off, there was still something mesmerizing about watching the screen fade away into darkness.
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More than that, trying to escape was engaging. It was, well, fun. The seed was planted, the spark was born.
So what were the key elements of this seed?
- Visuals: 150 boids spawn from the center of the screen outward in a flower pattern – this is cool. In this iteration, the boids that were neither ‘free’ nor an ‘agent’ were randomly colored some sort of pastel, with a tendency towards blue. They started on a gray background and their trails were permanent. There was no fading out. When a boid was ‘free’ its color would lighten, when it became an agent, its color darkened.
- Mechanics: No AI! All boids on the screen are affected by the flocking algorithm at all times. Agents are just black mindless boids. Neo follows the mouse cursor in addition to the flocking algorithm. This means that he can get stuck in large crowds. This is somewhat irritating, but also thrilling to try and pull him out. Agents and Neo spawn randomly – they don’t always exist at the start of the game. Some found this irritating, I thought it was an excellent mirror of natural chance. Boids also sped up and slowed down based on the draw of those around them.
- Feel: Somewhat harrowing but strangely addictive. Watching the screen turn black was frightening. It was surprisingly intense feedback that blatantly told you you’d lost. The black and white feel was classic – good versus evil.
I was confident, off to a good start, and – maybe – ready to expose the idea to new minds.