casher-Telematic

Sequential Sketches

My game is a simple take on Agar.io. To play, move the mouse around the screen, and your circle will follow in the center. The larger stars can be eaten to make you bigger, whereas if you eat the smaller stars they will release all of your current points and return you to the starting size. You can also eat other players to gain points. The goal is to try and get as big as possible without exploding from the little stars.

As seen in my sketches, this game was not my original plan. I ended up being too ambitious for my abilities in my first two ideas. The first was a "Hungry Hungry Hippo" type game, where all players would move their triangle characters around with the mouse, take pebbles from the center of the screen, stash them in their respective circles, and then proceed to steal pebbles from each other until one had 10 in their circle. When I realized that was too complicated, I tried to make a simpler shooter game, where each character controlled a triangle with the mouse and could shoot other players out of the game with the space bar. You can see all the geometric transformation calculations I was trying to do; unfortunately I was unable to figure those out, so finally I moved on to this simpler idea.

I wanted from the beginning for my environment to be mostly anonymous, as I was intrigued by the idea of creating competition that didn't really stem from anywhere. A lot of the time, people say that competition is based on social norms and expectations that society has created for specific groups, so we tend to feel the need to meet them in order to fit in. However, anonymously, in my game there is nothing to prove and no one to impress -- therefore, it shows how people are still eager to come out on top even without a reason, and that we are competitive by nature. I show each player their own name to create an identity for themselves, but I hide the names of other players to give the least information out as possible. The only number that defines them is how many points they have -- or, how competitive they are.