Here’s a trick you can use next time you are expanding a successful jam game but aren’t sure how to control the scope:
Mirror the scope of an existing game.
This way you know the project won’t be unbounded and you can get past the planning phase quickly with an already-proven plan.
After my game PsychoTennis won the gold medal for Fun in the competitive/solo bracket of Ludum Dare 34, I decided the feedback was positive enough to justify expanding the game.
The original jam version takes the classic game Breakout, flips it sideways, adds gravity, and turns the paddle into a tennis player who can jump and swing:
Original Jam Version
The jam version generated semi-random layouts of bricks that got tougher and tougher, while the ball got faster and faster with each “match” or screen the player won. It was great fun for 5 or 15 minutes, which is about what I target for a jam game.
But it didn’t have staying power, and it seemed like this fun core could support more content.
The Risk of Scope Expansion: Months lost with nothing to show.
I knew from experience this was dangerous, this urge to expand a game to make it better.
Last year I lost a few months to a failed scope expansion. I thought I had a cool idea with my 2015 7-Day Roguelike Challenge entry, a mind-boggling affair where your inputs simultaneously control two characters in a top-down shooter bullet-dodging game where time only flows while you are inputting commands. I thought the core was interesting, but somehow the resulting game just wasn’t fun enough.
So I started having ideas, and adding things. Exploding barrels. Clouds of gas that create status effects. More upgrades. More weapons. More enemies. The game got clunkier, but it didn’t get more fun.
Several months later I was MAN DOWN on my 1-Game-a-Month streak with nothing to show for it, and pulled the ripcord.
Lesson learned: Be careful expanding a finished jam game. Don’t even start if you don’t have a concrete goal, and have a plan to avoid an infinite quagmire. If you can’t do that, just leave the game as-is and move on to the next project, older and wiser.
Initial Scope Roughing
I chewed on this dilemma for a bit. I wanted to expand PsychoTennis, but how was I not just repeating the mistake of Second Stepper? The Ludum Dare Gold Medal shined convincingly though, and I knew I had to go for it. I sincerely believed the core of PsychoTennis could support more gameplay than the jam version offered.
First I set out choosing a broad scope guideline. Arbitrarily, I decided that my goal was to expand the game from 5-15 minutes of fun, to about one hour of fun.
My next decision was that I would introduce actual “Matches.” The jam game called each screen a match, but I wanted to enhance the feeling of progress by having matches feel meaningful. The next natural idea was to add some kind of “opponent” to give each match some flavor, and to let the player notice the progress in some way other than a number going up.
I sketched out what it would mean to expand the scope this much:
Map of First Scope Expansion
I hate implementing UI so I have marked in blue the various screens I would need to build. I also hate slowing the player down with a lot of button presses in between the action, so I have marked each non-game input required by the player in red. These things are called out because I want to minimize them.
Deciding on a Scope Target by Mirroring a Specific Game
The next day I was walking down the street thinking about what the right difficulty curve would be for these matches. How hard should they be? How many should there be?
And suddenly it hit me: Why not mimic both the scope and the difficulty from the original NES version of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out?
My first opponent would be equivalent in difficulty to Glass Joe. The mid-game would be heavy with gimmick-oriented opponents. The end game would stress raw speed and skill, and the final boss could be as hard as Tyson himself. I sat down at a spreadsheet that night and mapped out Punch-Out in one set of columns, and did design for my own game row-by-row, mirroring the scope of Punch-Out.
And just like that I had removed the risk of unbounded scope and had a clear plan in front of me. Better still, it was a clear plan that had already proven itself successful, because Punch-Out is just an awesome game.
I was very happy with how quickly this closed most of my open questions and provided an implementation roadmap. I went from thrashing around with high-level questions to ripping out implementation, and I’m very happy with the result.
Here’s a picture from one of the later matches in the game:
I will definitely use this technique again in the future, and I recommend you consider it for your own post-jam expansions for games that warrant it. But I still urge you to think twice before even starting!
PsychoTennis still needs a little polish and a few minor bugfixes, and maybe an integration with an online leaderboard, but all of the opponents are in place and available to play in a feedback build you can grab for free, here on itch.io.
Give it a shot and let me know what you think!
And if you like the idea of mirroring scope, post a comment – what do you think would be some good games to mirror?