SCENES - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 57

Figure 3.19 Fish pursue a squid in Pond Squid .

All the fish follow a really simple rule, you see. They just move directly toward the squid. So
though their numbers grow continuously, they all merge into a single cloud that basically
moves as one. Now, at that point I wasn't the Baba Yaga of game design I am today, but I real-
ized the solution called for another object, another kind of fish. The fish that I added followed
the same rule for pursuit as the first one—move directly toward the squid—but at half the
speed.

And that worked, or it would have if I hadn't made the type of fish that appears totally
random—meaning the player could see fish that move at the same speed for a really long
time without ever seeing a slower fish. But when there's a mix of fast and slow fish, the game
is much more interesting to play than when there's just fast fish or slow fish. You can see similar
design in “bullet curtain” shooting games—different layers of bullets that are moving at dif-
ferent speeds at the same time are much more complicated to navigate than a field of bullets

moving at the same speed.

The lesson is that layering is important. Having objects that stack in interesting ways cre-
ates more interesting choices. Six years after I made Pond Squid , I was confronted with the
importance of this rule again while working on Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars (http://games.
adultswim.com/lesbian-spider-queens-of-mars-twitchy-online-game.html). In this game, a
Martian spider-queen pursues her escaped slaves through a maze, attempting to zap them with
a bondage laser and recapture them. The slaves are armed, so if one of them manages to get