About the game mechanic

Cosmologicon on 2023/09/24 01:39 of Universe Factory 36

My first OpenGL game just had you fly through space and land on a few shapes. I randomly made one shape almost black, and the only way to find it was to notice it blocking out the background stars. I loved this part. Staring at the screen, catching a star winking out of the corner of your eye, and then racing to catch it before you lost it and it disappeared again. I found it thrilling.

Later I tried the game on a different monitor, the black shape was much easier to see, and it wasn't fun anymore. An impossible to notice difference between black and almost black on one setup can be clear as day on another. Even the viewing angle for LED displays makes a huge difference: the game went from hard to trivial just by tilting the laptop screen a little.

I think this might be why you don't see this mechanic in video games, at least I don't know any examples. But I've always wondered if there was some way to use it reliably. So this game is my best attempt at making this black-object-on-black-background mechanic work. We'll see how it turned out.

Clearly I needed a way to adjust the prominence of the background. It took some tweaking but I got something I'm happy with. But then how to choose the right setting for any given player? I went the route of trying to describe what it should look like, and asking the player to adjust it until it looks right to them. One alternative I implemented but abandoned was a calibration minigame, where the player has to click on a black box as a background gradually brightens. Different approaches have different issues, which I'm sure you can guess some of.

I'm definitely interested in any thoughts you have on ways to make this idea work better. Thanks for trying the game and thanks for putting up with this little experiment!