The DEVLOG

Spinny Clicky

I had the idea for spinny clicky after playing some of the popular game 'among us'. In among us there's plenty of mini games, one of those minigames is called 'calibrate distributors'. In this mini game you have to use 'mouse 1' to  stop a rotating ring at the correct point in its rotation... except you don't just do it once, you do it three times. 

I saw an opportunity in this mini game to adapt and expand on this simple concept. I've never considered myself to be a gifted artist in any way and so when I refer to expansion I'm talking about a purely game-play or mechanics stand point. 

Here are some of my proposed expansions:

- More or less rings

- Countdown timer

- Multiple rotating pieces on one ring

- Clockwise and Anti-clockwise rotation 

- Replacing the static point with another moving piece

With these in mind I set out to create my new hyper casual one button game, inspired by 'calibrate distributors'.

The process was not as simply as I'd first imagined it. I had already figured out how to make objects move in Game Maker Studio 2 but I'd never tried to rotate an object. Some time and a bit of googling later, I had done it. Next I set it up so there were 3 rings of varying size all within each other like a Russian doll set.

I now had it set up so that all 3 rings would rotate and stop when the 'mouse 1' aka left click event was registered by the game. Next I made the rings begin rotation sequentially one after another. Once this feature was added I quickly ran into problems. The problem seemed to result in all rings registering a successful 'win state', even after only the first or second ring was stopped. I tried several times to fix this issue with the addition of variables and if statements.

Unfortunately however given the nature of the task at hand and knowing I had precious little development time left I opted to redirect my focus and change the gameplay to opt for a more simplistic system. Now instead of the rings beginning their rotation in sequence, they would all begin rotation together but at different speeds. This essentially means that you only need to wait for the slowest ring to finish its rotation when you click.

Next I implemented a score system with a very slap-dash 'written font' style number score sprite series from 0 to 9. If you stopped the rings rotating at the right point then you scored 30 points (10 for each ring) but if you didn't, the the rings would reset and you'd lose whatever score you'd racked up. As well as your current Score being displayed I also displayed you High-score for that session and in a different colour to mark the difference. I considered storing the High-score in a text file but opted against it due to time restrictions. 

I added a few final tricks to make the game seem smarter than it really was like; randomized rotation direction for each ring, randomizing which ring was the fastest and which was the slowest and offsetting the origin of the rotational position for each ring.

I had a lot of fun making this game and I was pleased to see it place 11th for innovation in gameplay. I hope to come back to it in the future to release it to the play store after some much needed reworks and modifications.