the maze-fruits are ripe and this little piggy wants to fill her belly. the big bad wolf wants to fill her belly too, and she wants a meal she has to catch. player one is this little piggy, and wins by collecting all the fruit in the maze. player two is the big bad wolf, and wins by collecting this little piggy. this game is for two players only!
i find it a little worrying that the trend in videogames over the past thirty years has been increasingly toward the solitary, single-player experience. we take for granted that characters in a game - often the majority of the cast - will be played by “the computer.” this little piggy is a “monsterless game” - a term i coined in conversation with eric-jon rossel waugh in lucky juju pinball museum - a game all of whose actors are controlled by human players.
one of the difficulties in multiplayer game design is that the platforms designed with more than one player in mind - “consoles” - have corporate gatekeepers, and the platform easiest for the largest number of people to design and code for - the home computer - isn’t designed for the playing of games. having multiple people play a game together on the same computer usually means a bunch of hands crowded on the same, too-small keyboard.
in snake heart apple, i mitigated the issue by having one player use the keyboard and the other the mouse. in this little piggy, both players have similiar controls to the point of actually sharing a button. pressing the spacebar changes the layout of the maze - switching between the blue and green paths - and either player may hit it at any time. after it’s hit, the bar at the bottom of the screen must fill before it can be used again.
13 comments
Cute game. I’ve been reading your blog for awhile but never really bothered to comment.. until now. So, hi. :)
I really liked this. It reminded me a lot of a 2-player Pac-Man, but without all the frustration a 2-player Pac-Man would eventually cause.
Good job.
Nice one, I really dig your multiplayer experimentations, although I don’t know if the term “monsterless game” is that descriptive.
1. There are many games in which all actors are human e.g. most competitive multiplayer titles, or singleplayer titles like Breakout and most puzzlers).
2. In the games you mentioned (SnakeApple & Piggy) one of the players assumes the role of a monster (easily identified as the one who threatens the other actor by being able to kill him i.e. the ‘chaser’).
What I personally find more interesting about this is the asymetry of the players’ verbs and goals.
Most competitive multiplayer games try to even things out by giving competitors balanced resources to achieve completely symmetric goals (often: kill other player).
But in your titles, the roles players assume are entirely different, which makes balancing harder (yet at the same time not that important, cause players could change roles and then compare individual performances, which would probably lead to preferences i.e. someone’s better suited in the role of the monster).
Btw: I think it’s interesting to note how your two games are basically variations of the very first videogame, Ralph Bear’s ‘chase’:
“In the small room he had commandeered for the demo, Ralph showed the first playable video game: the Chase Game, consisting of two squares chasing each other.”
http://www.pong-story.com/sanders.htm
Btw2: have you ever played North & South? (Amiga version is rad.)
The conquering of forts is basically a sidscroller were one player tries to advance to the goal in time, while the other defends in that he controls the appearance of obstacles (throwing knives & enemies).
I’m also glad to see you’re still doing new things with the shared control idea.
The intimacy of the kayboard might really be one of its most ignored strengths (or rather, has only been seen as an annoyance yet).
Yet it still seems to remain a bit underutilized here, and falls short of its potential.
Let me explain why I think so:
1. The shared input is mapped to the ingame action that is used the least often.
2. Using a shared input doesn’t affect its usage i.e. if you’d used two seperate buttons, the game would still play out in the same way.
It’s interesting to think about how actual impact on gameplay could be achieved.
Maybe bay also mapping an action to pressing the button for some time to its release?
3. Why the spacebar?
I mean at first I thought it was the obvious choice, but it’s exactly its size that is what makes it uninteresting.
As said, the strength of the cramped keyboard is the forced intimacy.. unintentional physical contact and its unforseeable impact on a player’s performance is something you don’t have with two seperate input devices, but this is greatly diminished, using the biggest key available, were players may rest their fingers on the edges without ever touching each other.
I’d use the smallest key I could find, so that it’s absolutely impossible for player’s no to get in touch, and maybe even wrestle over a comfortable (or advantagious) position on the key.
I’d also like to see some totally twisted inermangling of control shemes (and fingers).
PS: little suggestion in general:
It took me some time to figure out that space starts the game, as it’s usually Enter that’s used to start a game and ESCAPE (which works fine btw) to end it (also mentioned in the accessibility guidelines).
Space is usually used to toggle between options (e.g. check/unchek checkboxes in windings)
Always having to choose if I want to stretch the screen at the beginning is a very unelegant way to start the game.
I’d somehow make it less intrusive.. maybe by saying something like “space toggles screen size” during the ‘tutorial’.
Anyway, enough nitpicking.. I really like your stuff and hope you found my ramblings at least a bit useful.
i’ve never played north & south (though i’ve heard of it) but i just looked up a video. i like this kind of asymmetrical scenario, sort of like steve jackson’s ogre, where one player controls a single powerful actor and the other controls lots of weaker ones. i just found out that the nes port of raid on bungeling bay does this, too: in two-player mode, one player flies the helicopter and the other player commands the “enemies” trying to shoot down the helicopter that would normally be controlled by the computer.
i decided on the term “monsterless” because of the tabletop role-player tradition: any character who wasn’t a player character was a “monster” and was hence under the control of the dungeon master. in videogames, the computer has replaced the dungeon master.
and sure, there are abstract games where the single player is playing against the rules, not an actor. but in most cases where there are multiple actors, either some of them are played by the computer, or they’re played by someone on the otherside of an internet connection, which isn’t the same social situation i’m interested in (though often an interesting one nonetheless).
i didn’t quite want to get into all out finger-wrestling with this game because that’s what chicanery is about. but physical contact is the context of a videogame is undoubtedly a theme i’ll return to.
i do have some other two-player games in the works.
I’ve found that the players can get in a bit of a stalemate if the wolf camps the furthest corner of the map with the last fruit. The pig pretty much can’t do anything about it unless the wolf gets impatient and decides to make a move.
did you play the release build? if the wolf sits in one spot for too long, she’ll move automatically, hopefully giving the piggy an opportunity to dash in and grab the fruit.
Oh, I was playing that beta you sent me :X
Well I wasn’t explicitly speaking about online games, but nearly every vs mode (Street Fighter, Bomberman, Wii Sports).
But yes, I didn’t make the connection with tabletop RPGs, and something like ‘asymmetric competition’, just wouldn’t sound as nice.
Thx for the tips, I have to check out Bungeling Bay and find out a bit about Ogre.
PS: just remembered, there was also this Counter-Op mode in Perfect Dark, where one player assumed the role of an enemy.
More games should have this..
this game isnt monsterless AT ALL. worst description ever
the real monsters are ourselves
I played this yesterday morning without having even read the post, so I knew nothing about what the game was all about and didn’t know it was a 2 player game. So I played alone (with the pig) wondering what the hell was going on. It was weird. I didn’t notice what was wrong until later when I realized I was missing another person (during the day, not while playing).
After that I played again with my brother and it was a riot. Immensely fun game. The shared space bar is such a good idea, it gives the game a great part of its flavor.
Congrats, Auntie!
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[…] sono focalizzati nella creazione di giochi principalmente incentrati sul multiplayer. Così, dopo This Little Piggy, che ci ha regalato spassosi momenti in compagnia, è giunto il momento di giocare in quattro: […]
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