(For a CTIN541 assignment.)
Overview
Butterfly Garden is a suite of thematically integrated casual games that are played in a highly social context, such as a preexisting social network like Facebook. The premise of Butterfly Garden is that players can design the wings of butterflies and share their designs anonymously. This design could be a simple pattern, like a real butterfly's wings, or it could be a drawing, a picture, or a poem. The player creates a butterfly with a design, and releases it into the wild. The butterfly will then find its way into the gardens of other players, who will be able to see and comment on the design.
There are three major phases of the Butterfly Garden game. The first phase is planning, creating and maintaining a garden. The garden is collectively owned by a group of friends who must work together to build it and keep it up. Once the garden has reached a certain level of growth and variety, it begins to attract butterflies. The second phase of the game is capturing, collecting and categorizing the butterflies that have been attracted to the garden. Each player captures and collects butterflies individually. The final phase of the game is breeding mature butterflies together to create a new butterfly, adding personal artwork to the new butterfly, and releasing it into the game ecosystem.
The different phases overlap so that once a group has gotten their garden started, all three phases are accessible simultaneously. Each phase is intended to appeal to different players, allowing them to concentrate on the parts of the game that they find most fun. The first phase is a cooperative, nurturing game in a sandbox-style game-space. The second phase is a collecting game with more competitive potential. The third phase is a creative exercise with some elements of sharing and communication.
The Capture game is a short, real-time 2D mini-game that takes place when a player spots a new and interesting butterfly. In order to capture the butterfly, the player must win the capture game. Once the butterfly is captured, the player can add it to her collection or attempt to breed it to create a new butterfly.
The intention of the Capture game is to evoke the feelings associated with catching butterflies in real life: the erratic movement of the butterflies, the frenetic energy of the chase, the difficulty of trying to keep track of one butterfly in a swarm and estimate its position in space, and the mix of skill, patience and luck that is necessary for success.
Players
The Capture game is for just one player. It follows the very common Single Player vs Game interaction pattern. The purpose of this is to keep the experience as casual as possible. Casual play implies that the period of play may be both unscheduled and brief. This is antithetical to a synchronous multiplayer game, which requires substantial planning and commitment to coordinate multiple parties. Butterfly Garden involves multiple players interacting in indirect or asynchronous ways, but the real-time mini-games like the Capture game involve just one player at a time.
There is also a potential variation that has three players working cooperatively to catch the butterfly. In this variant, each player would be able to move just one part of the net, so the three would have to work together in order to succeed. Although there is some potential for a different play experience here, there are still some unresolved issues with this variant (how the three players would communicate in order to coordinate their movements, for example).
Objective
The goal of the game is for the player to manipulate the elements onscreen into a pattern such that the three corners of the net surround only the desired butterfly. This must be done before time runs out or the butterfly escapes the gameplay area.
Set-Up
This diagram shows the game's initial condition, before play has started.
Gameplay Area: The game is played on a square area that represents a field.
Butterflies: At the center of the gameplay area are nine butterflies. Eight of the butterflies are blue and one is red, marking it as the butterfly the player is trying to catch.
Net: In the corner are three points, clustered together, with lines connecting them. These points represent the corners of a net with which the player will try to catch the butterfly.
Cursor: This icon represents the current position of the mouse. It moves around the gameplay area as the player moves the mouse.
Margin: There is a small margin between the net and the edge of the gameplay area. This margin represents the edge of the field. Any butterfly that goes into the margin has escaped from the field and can no longer be caught by the net.
Timer: This shows the amount of time remaining for the player to win the game.
Procedure
Starting Procedure: From the garden interface, the player clicks on a butterfly. This brings up the Inspect Butterfly screen, where the player can get a closer look at the butterfly’s design. If the player would like to add the butterfly to her collection, she clicks on the "Capture" button on this screen. This takes her to the game screen, where play begins immediately.
Play Procedure: The game interface is extremely simple and uses only the mouse. By moving the mouse around the gameplay area, the player influences the movements of the butterflies and the net.
The nine butterflies move around the board in a semi-random manner. When they are within a certain distance of the mouse pointer, however, they tend to move in the opposite direction, although their motion remains somewhat unpredictable. The player can use this behavior to corral the butterflies and prevent the red butterfly from escaping the play area, or to separate it from the other butterflies.
The mouse pointer affects the corner points of the net in a similar, but more predictable way. The corner points are pushed directly away from the pointer at a speed determined by its proximity. When the player moves the mouse pointer close to a corner point, it quickly accelerates across the gameplay area. This influence falls off after a certain distance, however, so that it has very little effect on the corner points when the mouse pointer is not close by. The player can use this effect to move the triangular net to a different part of the board, move the points apart to make the net bigger, or push them toward the center to make the net smaller.
In this diagram, you can see a game in progress. One of the blue butterflies has escaped the gameplay area; another is in the process of escaping. The arrows represent how the movement of the game elements is influenced by the mouse pointer. This image represents a potential winning condition for the player.
The player can also click the left mouse button at any time to "swing" the net and try to catch the red butterfly inside. If, at the time that the player presses the button, the red butterfly is within the triangle formed by the three corner points of the net and all the other butterflies are outside of this triangle, then the game is over and the player wins. If these two conditions are not met, then the net must reset. Resetting happens automatically and takes a very short period of time, during which the three corner points are frozen on the screen and the net cannot be swung again. The butterflies continue to move during this time, and are still influenced by proximity to the mouse pointer.
Swinging the net when the winning conditions haven't been met can be to the player's advantage, since it gives her a moment to corral the butterflies while the net remains fixed. However, it also effectively lessens the amount of time the player has to win the game, since the timer continues to count down during the period that the net is resetting.
Rules
Butterfly Movement: The butterflies are constantly moving. Butterfly movement is designed to be erratic, but to follow a couple basic guidelines. As such, there are three components to the movement of each butterfly. The first is a randomized vector, which adds a substantial amount or randomness to the overall path and makes the butterfly’s movements erratic and hard to predict. The second component differs for the two types of butterflies. For the red butterfly, it is a vector toward the edge of the gameplay area. For the blue butterflies, it is a vector toward the red butterfly. This second component encourages the butterflies to cluster together, requiring the player to force them apart, and also moves them toward the edge of the gameplay area where they will escape, forcing the player to corral them. The third component is a vector directly away from the mouse pointer, scaled according to how far the pointer is from the butterfly.
These component vectors are added together, resulting in a destination point a short distance away from the butterfly. The butterfly moves to that point, and once it has reached it, the component vectors are recalculated and a new destination is set. The result is a movement pattern that is largely random, but which tends toward clustering, moving toward the edge of the gameplay area, and moving away from the mouse pointer. The butterfly continues moving in this way until the game ends or it ends up in the margin of the gameplay area, at which point is escapes and is removed from play.
Net Movement: The net moves according to its velocity vector, which is an inherent property of each corner point. On each game cycle, an acceleration vector is added to the velocity of each corner point, pushing it away from the mouse pointer with an intensity based on the distance between the corner point and the mouse. Then, after the corner point's position has been updated according to its current velocity vector, the velocity is scaled down slightly, representing the force of friction decelerating the corner point. The result is a smooth, sliding motion across the gameplay area that gradually slows to a stop when the mouse pointer is not nearby.
The corner points of the net do not interact with the butterflies, but they do interact with each other and with the margin of the gameplay area. When a corner point hits another corner point, they bounce away from each other and maintain their velocity. When a corner point hits the margin of the gameplay area, it bounces away and its velocity is dampened significantly.
Variations
There are a number of variables that should be examined through playtesting in order to adjust the challenge and entertainment value of the Capture game. Some of these variables include the amount of time the player has to complete the game; the number of butterflies, their speed, the size of their hops and the amount of randomness reflected in each hop; and the force of acceleration on the net’s corner points due to the mouse, and due to friction.
There are other variations that could be made to improve the game, make it more or less challenging, or simply to change the play experience. A multiplayer variant was mentioned above, in the section on players. Changing the icons used for the butterflies could also change the experience, by making it harder to distinguish between the target butterfly and the others, or by making the butterflies blend into the background of the play area. Adding corner points to the net would also make the player’s task more complicated.
In the end, some of these variations might be included in different places in Butterfly Garden. Some butterflies may be more difficult to catch, for example, or may require cooperation between players. The standard version of the game as it is presented here, however, is intended to be a good baseline. The point of the Capture game is to provide some challenge, but it should be more fun than frustrating. The design choices made here are intended to serve that goal.
Simple Game Flow Diagram
