Foresight and Flirting

New dance moves! New guests! This update has it all.

At the end of the last update boogie worked like this: you can boogie three times per room, and each boogie causes all guests take one step towards you. I don’t really like this kind of ability. It’s limits are arbitrary and its effects are incremental, the positional equivalent to “+5% fire resistance”. Having stewed on the latest version of the game overnight, a better version of boogie presented itself. Now, you can only boogie once per room (stingier by the minute!) but when you do it reposition the move targets of all guests to be as close to you as possible.

So far I’ve found this much more interesting. Instead of changing the guests’ positions, which are resolved immediately, it changes the guests’ intentions, which are resolved over several rounds. This creates space for some scheming between the boogie and the guests arriving at their new destinations. It can also dramatically shift the energy of the room. You can turn a disparate, anti-social affair into a cramped rager, which happens to be very useful for getting information on the personas of the guests.

We also added a new persona, the flirt! Thematically, this was something that I’d wanted to include from the get-go, but I couldn’t find a good fit in time for the jam. Now that scoring had been clarified, the new ruleset came into focus pretty quickly: The flirt gives good vibes to the closest guest(s) they can see. Its about 6 lines of code, but it has remarkable bang for its buck. For the deduction game, the flirt leverages both line of sight and changing the vibes of other guests, both of which overlap with other personas in interesting, ambiguous ways. For the tactical game, flirt is one of the most effective way to score points if you can manage their position relative to the other guests.

Finally, the most important change of the lot: the player now dances in time with the music. When you find this level of whimsy in my games 9 times out of 10 it was my girlfriend’s idea. Shoutout Lauren.

That’s all for today! Thanks for sticking around. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.