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LD23 Warmup – Pew Pew
So, I decided a while back that I would join the warmup weekend.
It’s much longer than a weekend, and that makes me happy. 
My game is a shmup. I’ve been working on one, but I need a cleaner code base to work from. The one I had is a mess of excess inheritance and unimplemented methods.
Here’s the premise: You fly a little space ship and shoot bad guys. On different intervals (in kill count) enemies either give off a bigger explosion, drop a score/weapon/extra life item, or give off a bigger explosion and drop three items.
The levels are assembled randomly from hand-made parts and have randomly chosen bosses from about a dozen hand-scripted bosses.
The idea is this: Motivate the player with scheduled reward to make the game more compelling.
The idea comes from the idea that games work partly by rewarding the player. Hence, I figure that I can make a compelling game simply by deliberately rewarding the player.
The Wikipedia article about behaviorism can give those who are curious a better idea of how this is supposed to work.
Peace, love, and manipulation,
- Henry
Edit: While I’m at it, here’s the article about behavior modification, which is also relevant
One reason rewards work is because they’re earned, not given for nothing. How fun would the olympics be if everyone got a gold medal?
You DO earn the rewards, just not for doing much, and you earn them fairly often. They’re small, though.
My going theory is that small, frequent rewards are a more powerful motivator than infrequent, large rewards.
I think there will be a saturation like the coins in super mario, but I’m curious about your game ^^