Sphere of Influence is a reflection of my interests as a game designer because it has unconventional controls, easy-to-understand gameplay, and a distinct visual identity. These three traits are a recurring theme in all of my solo work. Additionally, the overarching aesthetic and premise of the game are inspired by my recent misadventures with the networking app LinkedIn. The concept of ‘climbing a social ladder and trying to make as many friends as possible’ could have been taken in a darker direction, but I prefer to keep things wholesome and optimistic, which is also reflected in the game’s dialogue.

Through working on this game, I learned that it is much easier for me to make something new than it is to edit something that already exists. I coded a large majority of the basic gameplay within the first two weeks of the quarter. Most of my time was spent fixing major bugs, making small tweaks for game feel, and creating the UI. I found it a lot more satisfying to add new mechanics to the game than to fix the issues with my code.

The core loop of my game stayed the same from conceptualization through to the final product. The biggest change made to the structure was that I split the game into levels. When I first imagined the hoop swinging around, I vaguely imagined some sprawling white plain with infinitely big dimensions. I instead chose levels so that the ring size could be reset periodically. This also allowed me to exponentially increase the amount of friends that each dot represented, so I did not have to manually place 8000 dots. Finally, it let me scaffold with the level design, including more difficult jumps with each level. This would have been impossible with an infinitely generated world.

I chose to make the tutorial quite traditional. Some players may find this boring, but many playtesters had trouble with even the smallest of jumps, so I felt that I really needed to teach the player the unconventional movement in a thorough way.

The aspect of Sphere of Influence that I’m most proud of is the art design. I don’t consider myself much of an artist, but I do enjoy making art when I am able to. I feel that the colorful, cartoonish art style allowed me to create a lot of sprites that were within my skill level while still looking polished. The unique cast of characters is a group that I think a player would legitimately want to learn more about, and the visual aesthetic of the game is pretty much exactly how I envisioned it.

Unfortunately, a lot of the dialogue that was meant to give the characters more personality ended up being pretty half-baked. Sure, there are some funny lines in there, but I was planning on spending much more time on it. I was committed to writing at least 3 lines for each character, so a lot of them are quite uninteresting and would need to be redone.

I don’t think that my rushed dialogue affected the game much in the end, though, because all of the playtesters completely ignored the dialogue outside of the tutorial. I realized from talking with them that there’s a fundamental contradiction between the goal of the game - making friends as quickly as possible so as to not lose any to time - and the act of halting your momentum, looking away from the action, and reading a text box. One of the main design goals of the game was to make the player feel as though they’re meeting a bunch of people, so I wouldn’t want to scrap the dialogue system entirely. One of my classmates suggested an incentive where if you discover all of a best friend’s dialogue, the friend dots around them won’t turn black. I think that that’s an interesting idea to play around with. I also could make it where the player doesn’t have to move on to the next level until they’re ready, so even after touching all the dots they could still choose to read best friend dialogue in a less fast-paced environment.

Even though the scope of my initial pitch was not incredibly sprawling, I still had to scale it down. Luckily, though, I think that I still managed to create a well-balanced final product. What I mean by that is that my development time was not all concentrated towards one aspect of the game; I spread it out. There’s more that I would like to do with the narrative (multiple endings, more dialogue) and more that I would like to do with the gameplay (moving best friend pegs, perhaps some obstacles), but as it stands now I think there’s a decent amount of interesting narrative and gameplay.