Post Launch Analysis

Hi! I thought it would be worth writing a little about this game now it's out, and its biggest hiccups have been addressed.

The game initially launched without the plates at the bottom of each column, which made understanding what exactly happens when you swap the columns pretty difficult. The pre-placed bun was added during development to help this understanding, but if you press one direction then the other, the second has no obvious effect due to those columns now being empty. Watching a few people play the game showed me my mistake very quickly, and I hope this change makes it a lot clearer!

Additionally, the initial black screen on first run is very long. The game is downloading during this screen, but it displays no message. I plan to resolve this completely, but I have reduced the download size as far as I can to try to mitigate this issue. A full fix will require overhauling how I'm handling assets, and was always on the roadmap for my games, but I thought I had more leeway before it was really needed. A few confused players have shown me that I was very wrong about this!

Overall the initial number of players/viewers of this game has been lower than expected. My previous game got some helpful boosting from a couple of popular blogs, but Lunch Rush is still only getting about half the views/plays when accounting for this. I don't really understand why - I would have said the game cover and manual are a lot stronger but clearly something isn't catching people's attention the same way!

Game Design and Inspiration

I'm also going to write a little about what lead to this game being the way it is. Hopefully the below is interesting to someone.

Lunch rush was originally conceived as my answer to the question 'could I make a game like Mario and Yoshi, that I like?'. Perhaps an odd question to ask, but that was the first game I owned on the Game Boy, and as a result I played it quite a lot. I didn't like it very much, because I'd played Tetris and Puyo Puyo and even then I could tell that something about the game didn't click in the same way. Revisiting it I found two major issues with it:

1. It's too slow. Even when the pressure is on, it feels glacial waiting for things to happen
2. It's pretty abstract. Sure, there's Mario enemies and Yoshi eggs, but what on earth are you doing and why?

I think my approach to the second problem was pretty clear: I picked something you build in stacks, and themed the game on that. My approach to the speed is hopefully worth a longer discussion

Game Speed

Just speeding up M&Y would not result in a fun game. For a game to be fun at high speed, you need to be able to succeed at a high speed as well. M&Y's system of dropping two blocks always felt like an attempt to solve the game's problem of not being super interesting. Removing it seemed like a clear way forward, but perhaps then the game would be too frustrating if you needed a piece to land all the way on the far side from the drop point. Cutting the number of columns to 3 (mostly) removed this issue, but it meant the number of button presses to move something over two columns was now potentially 4. Mario and Yoshi works using a sort of cursor - you move Mario so he's holding two columns, then press a button to swap them. With only two columns, in the worst case you would need to go move, swap, move swap. Clunky!

Aside: Controls

But if there's only two pairs that can be swapped, why not just use two buttons? After throwing together this change I had my answer: It was confusing. Most arcade puzzle games have you controlling the block or piece that is falling. This gives 'left' and 'right' a clear meaning. When the buttons you associate most strongly with those directions now do something else (and each moves something left and right) you have to fight your expectations to understand what happened. 

My biggest mistake when making this game was ignoring this problem as something I could fix later - when later finally came I was comfortable with the controls and could no longer tell what was needed to fix it. I ended up adding the tutorial to indicate what buttons to press and calling it a day.

Game Speed, again

With the game no fast enough to be fun, I was hit with another problem - if expected this time. With the compressed 3 column board, handling ingredients that had no 'good' place to land was a lot harder. My intent with the game here was to change something else I think M&Y got wrong - the inability to affect the middle of a stack. I initially considered allowing side by side pieces to clear, to allow strategies from Puyo Puyo to work. However, with the burger theming, this didn't feel like it would make much sense. The other idea I had was allowing column swapping to move partial columns, and to use the falling piece's position as the blocker. This was reasonably easy to implement, but it took a while to realise how powerful it was. It was a couple of days before I realised you could swap a bun into the bottom of an existing stack. You could also place a new burger on top of an old one, and split the pile when space becomes available.

This mechanic is, I think, the game's strongest feature, and the single hardest one to learn.

Success?

Did I make a game I like more than Mario and Yoshi? Well, yes. I think other people also probably like it more. Or they might, if they played Mario and Yoshi. Which I wouldn't ask anyone to do.

I do think Lunch Rush stands on its own as a fun game, but I think the on-ramp to understanding the game is too steep, and most would struggle to get good enough at the game to really enjoy it. I suspect the usual shenanigans of  modern game design could be leveraged here: daily challenges, and play rewards and shared high score boards. But these things take a lot of effort to make, and I'm not interested in tricking someone into liking my game.

If you liked it, I'm really happy about that. Let me know! Post about it on the social media of your choice, and let me know you did that too - itch's analytics are pretty limited so it can be tricky to see where players come from.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for playing

- Eel