Designing Player Experience in Evasion
Evasion is a simple race to the end game in which the player navigates a circle to a goal while avoiding obstacles that will destroy him. The background of the screen is black, while all the objects the player interacts with are white.
The game has two major obstacles – triangles, which move randomly around the screen and threaten to hit the player, and a wall which moves from the left of the screen, slowly encroaching upon the player and simultaneously decreasing the space that the player can freely move around in. We chose to represent the moving obstacles as triangles because they seem sharp and menacing. Cam wrote code to make the triangles move randomly, rather than simply up and down or side to side. The random motion is not only harder to avoid, but it makes the triangles seem more chaotic and unbalanced, adding to their threatening demeanor. Initially, the moving triangles were the only obstacle included in the design, but we chose to add the wall to ensure that the player keeps moving and is forced into the thick of gameplay.
The goal is represented by a large white circle, which contains a smaller circle cut out of it about the same size of the player. Since circles represent unity and balance, and the player’s circle will fit perfectly inside the larger circle, we believe this will be interpreted intuitively as the goal for the player.
When we were asked to add another choice for the player, we decided to make “safe zones,” represented by small white squares. When the player’s circle touches one of these squares, they cannot be harmed by the moving triangles. Therefore as the player approaches the goal, they can choose to move to-and-from the safe zone as they navigate around the moving obstacles towards the goal. However, the large threatening wall moving in from behind will still harm the player, so the safe zone is therefore only a temporary solace. The player must keep moving toward the goal if they want to survive.
Group Members: Annie Flynn, Cameron Basham, Jon Lloyd
