Gameplay decisions

[danielgwood]

Twooshes

One of the potential features was that if a full-length tweet (140 characters exactly), or "twoosh" to those who enjoy buzzwords, came up in the stream, it would represent an extra level of difficulty to the player - for example, it might cause a huge ball to appear, or perhaps something the player has to dodge/shoot.

We need to decide if we're doing this, because it has implications - if the player needs to be able to shoot or jump, the hero sprite will need to support this, and we'll need a way to interface it - when the device is shaken? when the screen is tapped?

Missile size

Should we vary the size of the balls or missiles at random, or attempt to make them reflect the actual tweets? If Twitter give us the information without us having to make additional requests, maybe larger balls occur on tweets that have been retweeted, or that come from more popular users.

Difficulty levels (speed)

Should we try to incorporate difficulty levels, which cause either a greater quantity of missiles, or speed of missile?

Practice mode

Are we intending to make an offline-accessible practice mode?

[verbitan]

Twooshes

I think we should support doing somethinig different here, makes the game more varied and exciting.

Missile size

For the same reason as above, varying the size of the balls is also a good idea. The Twitter REST API for searching returns a Tweet object which has a field called retweet_count, that should do us nicely.

Difficulty levels (speed)

This is an interesting point, how would we make the game harder? It was my understanding that we'd just play back the Tweets in real time. However depending on the Hashtag, this may not be very exciting.

Practice mode

Yes

[danielgwood]

Twooshes - my current thinking is to avoid adding any kind of firing to the game, I think it would overcomplicate the controls, and make it difficult to actually play. So perhaps just go with a huge ball that is particularly difficult to dodge.

Missile size - sounds good, and a lot more interesting than just varying them at random.

Difficulty levels - We could increase gravity/initial velocity, so the balls fall faster? Or even take the opposite approach - slow down the rate at which the player can move, so greater tilting is needed? Might be that we need to actually play the game on phones before deciding this - we'll need to see what "normal" is first.