Prototype 4 - A specific motion, analog sticks and the number 69

This weeks prototype prompt was a weird one, each person randomly chose a number (which I obviously chose 69), unaware that the number will DIRECTLY be part of the prompt. We also got randomized second parts of the prompt, mine was using analog sticks only, and using this motion:

The motion looked fun, cause its like a half pipe and I’ve been thinking a lot about skateboarding games. However, thinking a bit more about the fact that this game would be focused more on the controller itself, and being analog stick only, I turned my thoughts on making something more “alt-control” (which is not really alt, cause its still using a regular controller, but in a non obvious way). Particularly recent inspirations have been a bunch of stuff jwhop makes and Danny Hawks How to be born, an absolute masterpiece.

Quickly I had the idea of making a game about 2 controllers on an equivalent of a 69 pose.

The intereting thing about this idea is that the game existed (and was good) from its conception, the videogameless pitch itself was already good. The work would just be finding some gameness into it (maybe this is similar to the mario/nes stuff?). After starting making it work to test a protoprototype on our weekly playtest event, I realized the similarities with another amazing Danny Hawk game which I sadly have never played, Good Sex, I think conceptually, as a sex game, it is an unbeatable abstraction.

Since it seemed simple enought, and I wanted to avoid any complicated visualization, I decided to make the game in godot. Making it with primitive, almost debug-like shapes, so most of the focus of the game was on the controller themselves. After playtesting an early version, few people got the sexual connotation of it, which was surprising, but I thought that once I added some better palette and sound and rumble, it would be more obvious, we will figure it out later.

It was very hard finding good sounds, I don’t love the current frustration sigh, but its good enough. It was also very interesting to tune the rumble, since I learned that the controller has 2 different rumble motors and I tried making the game communicate different information with each. There’s a lot of potential to explore in the rumble. My roomate Julian also played the game a bunch and gave very good feedback, it was great seeing him like the game more and more as I polished the game feel.

I am happy with this one, curious about tomorrows playtest.