In the spirit of other indie game devs, I will be writing a couple of posts chronicling the development of Bots. Bots is a synchronous strategy game where two players compete to be the last one standing, or collect the most coins.

The Beginning.

The idea for bots came to me during GDC where, once again, I was told to make a game about something I know well. While I’m not a virtuoso hacker, I can write some mean code and decided to make a game around some sort of programming. The first challenge I experienced was abstracting the process of coding while keeping the feeling of making things do cool stuff (the reason I enjoy programming).

One of my initial ideas was to have both player sit at a terminal where they would type in commands to control their robots in real time. After some reflection I realized that this would be both complex and boring to people who don’t type very fast. In order to address both of these issues I decided to scale my game back and tried to simplify it. Instead of players typing their commands in realtime, I allowed players to select from a set of 7 actions (4 for movement, one for attack, one to defend, and one to reflect). I also narrowed down the playing field to a 5×5 grid and made the objective “destroy the other player”.

The paper prototype.

After nailing down the initial mechanics I decided to start testing the game right away. I really like paper prototyping. Making something is really rewarding, and paper prototyping lets you make a game really quickly. The initial prototype involved two white boards (for the players to write down the actions they would use for that round) two markers to represent the bots themselves, and a coin for the center tile. This was very versatile and allowed me to make several changes on the fly. After playing a few rounds of the game I tired to break the game by greifing it myself. I found that if a player stayed in the corner and waited for player 2 to come to them there was no way that they could lose. In order to prevent this turtling strategy, I added a second objective: Collect the coin. I placed a coin in the middle of the board so that if a player decided they wanted to hide in the corner, player 2 could simply walk to the middle and collect the coin winning the round. This proved to be a great addition resulting in a heavily contested area while making the game more exciting.

After the core mechanics settled I created a more polished version of the game (no use making it look too polished when heavy changes were imminent).