Inspiration “BENDER” by Akitoshi Shimizu, from Famicase 2011
Story Bender sees you starring as a Victorian Strongman at a travelling circus. Your skill is being able to bend pieces of metal to the specific angle that the audience demands!
Gameplay This will be a reaction/skill game. Holding down the single control button will bend the metal. Release the button when you think you have reached the desired angle. The first few bending attempts will have tutorial text displayed.
Points are scored for bending the rod accurately, with some tolerance around the perfect score. Watch out - you only get one attempt at a bend! Inaccurate bending will cause the audience to become angry. If they get too angry, it’s game over!
Over the course of a single game you will receive different rods to bend. Different metals bend at different rates, dependent on their tensile strength. As well as being able to judge angles quickly, learning the feel of the different metals is the key to success. Once you have encountered each type of metal, things will then be mixed up and become more difficult.
I may also add different thicknesses of metal, we’ll see. If everything goes well I may add a second, time-attack game mode.
Latest version Bender (should work in most browsers)
OK, so I’ve not been able to find anybody to do the graphics. My girlfriend was my first choice, but she’s too busy with work. :$
So, I’ve decided to reboot this: stick to the graphics on the cover and keep it simple. I’m now doing the game in JS, CSS & HTML and have something quick but promising to show:
Click anywhere on the page to bend. The goal of this version is to bend as close to 90° as possible. You will be marked (green/good, yellow/ok, red/bad) accordingly. Then you have to do it again.
I’ll be adding random target angles, plus different metals/bending speeds, and the more feedback as I juice this thing up.
The bar currently stops at 120°, and I want to put some visual feedback in at that point. Basically, the bar will snap in half and each part will fall off the bottom of the screen with an odd transition. You will only have three bars, and snapping will lose a life.
Also, if you get the bend perfect, I want there to be some juice where the perfect bar shoots up off the screen with a different, slicker transition.
Maybe I’ll add some suitable sounds, too. Though they could get annoying?
This is only a test of the engine, the finer details of the gameplay are still to come. It will be more varied and less repetitive. So, going over the angle will be less of the whole thing than it is now. This is only the beginning after a very small amount of work. I’m the master of procrastination! I figured I better do something since we’re at half way :P
Finally, I am considering locking down the screen size to a specific resolution, if I cannot get the layout behaving itself responsively.
So far the engine is a great concept all you need now is some more different stuff, like you can have a level with 3 of them to bend and add up there score, then make it harder my give less time to bend the metal. Or you can have different metal types, light metals than bend fast, stronger metals that bend slow, or mix, hard to bend in the beginning but get very easy as it approaches the 90 mark. doing good!
OK, I’ve added some juice - animations and sound. Thoughts appreciated.
I’m also part way through shifting all the animation heavy lifting out into CSS, and then I can simply add and remove classes in JS to make things move. Much less code. But I need to rethink a little bit of how it currently works. (Now done in below demo).
Hmm, I’m not sure what to do. I’ve added random target angles to my dev version and it changes the whole feel of the game… it makes it more difficult, requires more thought, and provides a different type of fun. Maybe I’ll do it as a separate mode?
This was the first game I played on here a couple weeks ago and sadly it’s one that I am not very good at! The hardest part is when the metal gets weakened and first bends quite slowly and then super fast, but that is a really clever touch, and through the screen I felt and was reminded of that distinct property of metal! From first reading your post, I liked the Victorian Strongman angle(heheh) quite a bit and if you made a sequel to this I think that having the graphics of a man, on stage with a bar, and perhaps showing your bends sequentially(as if it was one piece of metal, that you would bend many times) so you could see your progress or ‘the day’s work’ for a Strongman as it were, might be cute! Or in another direction, having fast paced or timed alternate/multiple bends(fibonacci bends?) could be, I think, a good challenge for the player. Because if you think about it, the bending is almost like a precision turn on a racetrack, and having multiple timed bends might be like navigating a course in a way. In any case, thanks very much for this!
