Looking Back At Pixy

The game

Pixy is among our first games. It was a relatively simple idea, derived from games where you have to make sure your cursor does not hit any walls, in turn inspired by wire loop games.

In Pixy you control a small pixy that is attached to your cursor.

The goal is to reach the end of the tunnel by making sure the pixy does not collide with any of the walls, meanwhile hitting as many diamonds that pass you by as possilble.

Most of the development time went into creating the tunnels, as they are procedurally generated. There were around 10 tiles in every column and after they were spawned the creating instance would eliminate an random amount of tiles, from a center. That center value could go up and down, creating a tunnel that did not have any places you could not get through.

Second part that took lots of time was the creation of the mapscene, that functionned just like the rest of the game. This meant you had to fly from main menu to episode to level to start playing a level.

December 18, 2009

Looking Back

The good

• Original gameplay
• Nice generic leveldesign
• Different mechanics: adventure, speed and puzzle

The bad

• Too much time and attention for everything around the gameplay, not the gameplay itself
• Balancing: enemies were too easy to defeat
• Pacing: the game was too slow. The following things were too slow or had a very tedious cooldown:
  • Shooting
  • Room transitions
  • Flying speed
  • Enemy speed (but they had to be slow because the shooting speed was slow)

Experimenting

At some point I found myself in a meetingroom where there was a Smartboard present. A smartboard is a huge screen that recognizes a pen and is primarily used in schools.

Since it was hooked onto a PC, I quickly downloaded Pixy and gave it a go. Even though it was quite impractical to use since the screen was so big, it was possible and fun!

Note how since the cursor was not always detected on this screen, I could teleport from one place to the other.

August 18, 2010