SWIM! is an experimental game originally conceived by Ben Brown and Dakota Smith to test ideas we had about in-game motivation and the concept of endless but ultimately futile gameplay.
Presented below are three prototypes we built to explore these concepts.
The core concept: how long will you click to keep your player alive?
Oh no! Your boat sank, and you are adrift at sea alone! Click the mouse to make your player swim, but don't click too fast or you'll get tired. Win points by staying alive!
When we created this first version of the game, we did not include the high score feature. Though it was amusing to watch the swimmer paddle away, there wasn't really much of a reason to go for the gold. As soon as we added the high score board, play time shot up and we started seeing people playing for 10 minutes or more! People like to compare their scores to other players!
Which got us thinking...
What's better than seeing scores from other people? Actually playing with other people!
We hacked out a quick little XML server and taught the Flash app how to talk to it. Now there's a whole ocean of little drowning dudes! We even put in a feature to allow for multiple simultaneous oceans, which meant we had to create a lobby screen.
Of course, this being an experiment, adding the multiplayer features broke some of the other features. Oh well! The point, for us, was that it was a fun concept to tinker with a little while longer.
For the final version of SWIM!, we added a drifting background effect, used cfxr to create some videogame sounds, and added an opening and finishing screen. We cut out the buggy multiplayer stuff, but left in the highscores.
We also decided to change the swimmer from a little 8-bit dude to the loneliest polar bear ever. If that doesn't motivate you to click, what will?
