Game Information
| Title | Coalesce |
| Presenter(s) | Jeremy Gibson |
| Session | Play the Past: Where Meaningful Play and Digital Humanities Meet to Talk |
| Time | Thursday, October 18, 11:00a-12:00p |
| Location | Gold A |
| Format | Game Exhibition |
| Description | Coalesce has a simple mechanic: use your finger on an iPad to draw curving lines through floating objects of the same color and then release, causing them to coalesce into a larger object; if you include an object of a different color in the line, it will prevent the others from coalescing and break already-coalesced larger objects down to their original components. However, from this single mechanic, several different games and gameplay feels can be created.
Coalesce is currently in development, and the plan is to release it in the fourth quarter of this year. In the existing version of the game, you can play a tutorial experience which explores the basic mechanics, several levels of the meditation experience, the more-intense scored mode, and the challenging obstacles mode. You can also see a single round which shows the new look that we've been examining for the game. In testing, we've found that the game is compelling to most audiences, especially teens and casual female players. We showed the game at the E3 IndieCade showcase and received very positive feedback from about 85-90% of people who tried the game. In terms of design, the game is interesting for a couple reasons. As mentioned above, it is a fun exploration of the potential of a single, simple game mechanic. It's also a great example of a game which works well as a collaboration between several co-located players. Additionally, we learned a lot through testing about subtle tweaks that can be done to make the behavior of the game better match the expectations of the player. One example of these tweaks is the "stickiness" of the line drawn by the player. In early playtesting, we found that players sometimes would start a line by drawing through a blue object, but by the time they connected the line to a second blue object, the first would have moved out of the tail of the line. When the player lifter his finger from the screen, the two objects would not coalesce because the first was no longer touching the line. This broke the player's expectation and caused frustration with the game. To fix this, we changed the game to cause objects to stick to the line (i.e. drop to 10% of their normal speed) if the player actually touches them with her finger (if an object simply passes into the line, it continues at the original pace). Though, as a designer, this change is very obvious to me, I have never once had a player notice it before I pointed it out to them; all they noticed was that they game felt better. |