The reason Foddy didn’t make a game until his late 20s was due to how hard it is to get started on even a very basic level. Turning it into a playable title is a huge challenge in itself, but it's easier than it used to be. Knowing what makes an amazing game and having a great idea is, of course, just the start. It's like, hey, look while I do some very hard to perform but ultimately fairly meaningless combination of buttons while you sit there and watch." MAKING A MASTERPIECE "From the game designer's point of view, it's like the infinite combo. "For me the moment that someone did a perfect break it was the end of snooker - the game is no longer interesting," he says. This is also a common design flaw in fighting games, albeit one that nowadays is patched out fairly quickly: the infinite combo, where one player can keep landing punches and kicks while the other player's character is too stunned to react. It's the random nature of PoleRiders that can make a game really fun It means you can still enjoy a game of pool against a more skilful friend, whereas go up against a world champion snooker player and there's a good chance they'll win the toss and pot everything on the table without you getting a chance to play. He feels that pool is more fun as a multiplayer game than snooker, as the table has been shrunk enough to introduce an element of randomness: hit the ball hard enough and something will go in. the idea of using physics is that you can be really great at it, but being really great at PoleRiders means that you win nine times out of ten, it doesn’t mean that you win every time," he says.įoddy compares the random element of PoleRiders to that of pool. "PoleRiders is designed to be slightly random.
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In PoleRiders, for example, the fact that you're carrying an elastic pole and have enough strength to spring the other player across the screen means you're never sure what the outcome of a particular clash will be. PoleRiders and Get On Top manage to be both hilarious and addictive, and much of this is down to their inherently random nature.įor Foddy, for a multiplayer game to be truly fun it needs to have a random element. MULTIPLAYER GAMES AND THE QUEST FOR RANDOMNESSįoddy's multiplayer games are some of the most fun we have ever played. With no health bar, IK+ is arguably more fun than modern fighting gamesįoddy misses games that make you go down in one hit, such as the venerable Amiga martial arts classic, IK+. You are hit, how are you supposed to know how far your health bar will go down? How many little pixels are still left on your health bar? Can you afford to be hit in a certain way? Well, the only way to know is to memorise the precise amount of damage. "I think that if you see a health bar you've blown it.
#Getting over it with bennett foddy stats series#
The player that succeeds gets a point, and the first to ten is the winner it's as simple as that.įoddy feels that other adversarial games, such as the Street Fighter series or Tekken, are unnecessarily complicated, which means only the very best players understand all the attacking options and so can predict and counter their opponents with intention and skill. In PoleRiders and Get On Top, there are just two players and the objective is to score a goal or knock the other player's head on the floor.
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You can see this approach in Foddy's two-player titles, too. "You could say that QWOP doesn't take place mostly on the screen anyway, it's taking place between you and your keyboard," says Foddy, "There's not much to get in the way." QWOP is the 100-metre sprint, but with time replaced by the distance you managed to run without falling over. GIRP is about rock-climbing and the only indicator of progress is how many metres you make it up the cliff. It's this desire to reduce clutter that drives the literal version of progress in Foddy's games. Progress? Fable II is cluttered with stats