YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD ARSONIST

Designed and created by Dwight Davis

Itch.io Page
Full Design Documentation

OVERVIEW

Your Friendly Neighborhood Arsonist is a casual platformer about cleaning up your community by burning down harmful buildings. Destroy fast food joints to increase your fitness, destroy arcades and casinos to increase your productivity, and destroy pollutive trash heaps to boost your dwindling community. As you increase your stats, you’ll be able to reach new areas of the map and burn down more buildings.

DETAILS

  • Team: Dwight Davis (solo developer)
  • Genre: Arcade Platformer game
  • Development Timeline: Jan 23-29, 2021 (made for Blackthornprod GAME JAM #3)
  • Software: Unity (engine), Adobe Illustrator (art), FL Studio (music & sound)

GAME MECHANICS

Goal
The player’s goal is to burn down all of the harmful buildings on the map. However, they’re extremely slow and the day ends too quickly. At the end of every day their community score drops, meaning they have limited time to burn down the buildings before their community is completely destroyed, leading to a game over.

Scores
The player has 4 main scores:
  1. Community — This is the player’s health gauge. If it drops to zero, it’s game over. Community drops by 4 points at the end of every day.
  2. Productivity — This score determines how long the day lasts. A low productivity score means that days will end quickly, but a high productivity score leads to longer days.
  3. Fitness — This score determines the player’s agility. A higher fitness score leads to faster running and higher jumping.
  4. Explosives — This is the number of explosives the player has on-hand. Explosives can be used to set buildings on fire.

Pickups
Every day, the map is covered in a new set of randomized pickups. There are 4 types of pickup:
  1. Heart — Increases your community score by 1.
  2. Coffee — Increases your productivity score by 1.
  3. Broccoli — Increases your fitness score by 1.
  4. Molotov — Increases your explosive score by 1.

Committing Arson
To burn down a building, you must stand in front of it and press a button to hurl molotovs at it. Each building has an integrity score, determining how much fire damage it can sustain before it burns down. Each building also has a set reward to one of your scores. The harder a building is to burn, the higher its reward will be. Although you can gradually improve your scores by obtaining pickups, buildings give bigger score bonuses.

Certain buildings sit in hard-to-reach locations which aren’t accessible until your fitness score is improved.

CORE GAME LOOP

  1. The day begins and new pickups are spawned across the play area.
  2. The player navigates to whichever platforms they can currently reach.
  3. The player collects pickups and spends explosives.
  4. The player repeats steps 3 and 4 until they run out of time.
  5. The day ends and a new day begins.


POSTMORTEM

The Good
  • Tutorial — This game features a comprehensive and clear tutorial which explicitly explains how each mechanic works.
  • Progression — It feels great to start at zero and work your way up. The changes in your scores happen gradually, but the effects are very obvious by the end of the game.
  • Level Design — The play area allows for exciting platforming and access to plentiful loot throughout the game experience.

The Bad
  • Difficulty — Although I intended this game to be easy, it turned out a bit too easy. I wish I had implemented a different failure mechanic than an HP bar, such as a set countdown of days or platforming hazards that spawn in over time. If the HP bar needed to stick around, I would increase your HP bleed in the late-game, or at least reduce the total HP. Alternatively, the game’s fail state could be removed altogether, turning it into a high score game where you attempt to win in the fewest days possible.
  • Late-Game Boredom — Once your productivity score is boosted past 50%, the days start feeling a bit too long. When you’re working on the final 1-2 buildings, you might run out of both pickups and explosives by mid-day, meaning that you just have to sit for 5-10 seconds while the timer runs out. If I were to rebuild the game, I would reduce the maximum day length by a significant margin and slightly increase spawn rates over time.
  • Molotov Spawn Rates — The earliest-accessible buildings have lower health, which means you don’t need as many explosives to destroy them. However, as the player gains access to higher-health buildings, coffee, hearts, and broccoli become irrelevant as molotovs grow more valuable. Therefore, the spawn rates should shift as you expand towards the late game, leading to bigger crops of molotovs when you’re down the final few buildings.
  • Visual Feedback — When you pick up coffee, broccoli, hearts, or molotovs, it’s not exactly clear what happens to your scores. And when you burn down a building, it’s not clear how that impacts the game. Whenever your stats are boosted by these things, a bold “+1” or “+10” should pop up by the impacted score, drawing immediate attention to the increases in each score. It would also help if productivity and fitness had their numeric values listed beneath their gauges.

Summary
My goal was to create a simple loot-grab game with a strong feeling of progression. I succeeded at this a bit too well, creating an experience where the player’s skills quickly overshadow any sense of challenge. I think the bones of this game are quite good. Just a few basic tweaks could introduce a more entertaining late-game and a more challenging experience overall.