After learning the seeker code I first made the opposite of seek which was repel. I found the repel mechanic a lot more compelling than seek. Now the player did not need to have direct control over the vehicles as they could simply react to forces in the world. Therefore I created agents for those forces in the form of orange markers. These would trigger a collision within a certain radius and then repel the vehicles. The original concept was for the background to change color after a certain number of collisions similar to my earlier inversion game. However, I abandoned this as it seemed too simplistic. It needed to act more like a system as we read about in Pond World where one is putting various agents into a world and letting them interact with each other. The desired effect being to create a balance. I am not sure it actually worked out that way. With Giles we set about creating more directed mouse movement as it seemed necessary to herd the vehicles in some fashion.
Giles then came upon the idea of using the ring lab and scaling them down to create a trail behind the mouse. The intent being that the trails would show the forces at work, where they were and where they were acting. In our implementation, they also had the unintended effect of simultaneously turning the markers’ outline the same color as the rings. In addition to the rings we added wrapping to the vehicles so that there would be a feeling of continuity as the vehicles would simply appear on the other side of the map.
In future I would like to add more forces acting on the vehicles. Perhaps some more enemy behaviour would be interesting to have a more aggressive ‘attacking’ style as perhaps the concerted effort of several markers could try and herd vehicles into a certain spot. Thus the role of the player would be to counteract this threat.
