Judy Yu and I wanted to create a game that was happy, pretty, and fun to play. I wanted to avoid feelings of darkness, horror, and suspense and the mechanisms of shooters and platformers that I saw in other Construct 3 games. We came up with the falling words mechanism idea pretty early on to incorporate the theme of falling and we wanted to create a nice background associated with the falling words. Our gameplay goals ended up being originality, falling words that would build a background scene, simplicity of controls, a slight increase in difficulty as the game progresses, and a sense of happy calmness for the player. We tried to implement this last goal by using happy music and a calm, pretty, natural scene for the background. This ties in to our aesthetic goal which was serene beauty that promoted contentment. Originally, we had intended all of the art to be pixel art; I figured this would be easiest to make look clean and consistent. However, our attempts at consistent, pretty pixel art did not produce promising results, so we switched to just drawing simple images by hand.
We tried to keep all elements of the game simple from the player’s perspective. We used simple controls (just arrow keys), a simple camera system (fixed third-person), simple gameplay objectives (collect all of the falling words by colliding with them but avoid the word “END”), simple art (2-D drawings with few colors and a flat texture), and simple sounds (just some light, happy music). This connects to the class concept of cohesion. We illustrated the class concept of progression by building the visual background as the player got closer to their goal of collecting all the words and used the class concept of variable difficulty level to a certain extent by using the progression mechanism to increase difficulty as the player progresses. Building the background visuals makes the player’s task harder because the new visuals are solid so the player must navigate their pencil icon around barriers to catch falling words. Though there is no obvious difficulty setting that the player can change, this solid visuals mechanism makes it so collecting words in one order may be more or less difficult than collecting them in a different order because it is harder to go around the mountain, for example, than a bird.
As mentioned above, we tried to make “Oh, Deer?” different from other games by making it neither a platformer nor a shooter. It is not really a maze, nor a puzzle, but somewhere in between with a bit of a time element as the player must catch words before they’ve fallen off the screen. Thus the basic mechanism of the game is fairly innovative, if I do say so myself. Also, we tried to make the game happy, which, though not unique, is fairly unusual from what I’ve seen of other games. There is a theme of creation as the player builds a world and the use of a pencil as the player’s icon illustrates a somewhat subtle theme of drawing. The player is creating art, drawing their own world. This is in contrast to common themes of shooting or destroying objects or bad guys or evading enemies.
Playtesting alerted us to many possible improvements including having a restart mechanism, a separate start screen with instructions, a more obvious “end” word, and some sort of game-over mechanism. In one iteration, we had a game-over text sprite that appeared when the player collided with “end”, but we replaced this with an automatic reset of the layout. Though my dad didn’t play the game, he gave me feedback on the art from looking at the game and this affected our decision to abandon the pixel art idea. After watching how people approached playing the game, how they moved around the screen and which words they went after, we realized we needed to adjust the speed of falling words and the player’s pencil icon. I increased the maximum speed of the pencil and increased the acceleration. After player/reader feedback, I changed the spawn points of all of the words so that the words fell from different places rather than each falling in the same place. I liked the “END” spawn point mechanism I stumbled upon which used an orbiting behavior on the spawn sprite. This made some points more common for “END” to spawn from and had an interesting side effect of producing “END”s at weird orientations. I wanted to make smaller orbits for other words’ spawn points so they fell at different places but within a limited section of the screen, however, I could not figure out how to lock other words’ orientations, so I used wrap and bullet mechanisms for non-”END” spawn points. This meant that the words could fall in any part of the screen, though I made some of the spawn points’ bullet speeds quite slow so the drop point location wouldn’t change too drastically between drops. I let the bird word spawn points move faster because birds can fly all over the place.