Switch!

Hi I'm back after my 2½ month vacation to New Zealand and 2 weeks in Australia which is why i haven't been writing on the blog.

The game Switch!

Yesterday I where at ITU for an anime marathon, and all through animes are cool that’s not what I wanted to write about, no I wanted to talk a bit about a game that were introduced to by one of the fellow anime watchers, a game called switch.

You got a 4-5 laneswith 4-5 players each in each and max 1 in 1 lane, the players can then move up and down swapping places with each other, on each lanes random generated pickups occur and like a side scrooller moves towards the players, for now the pickups are +star’s –(minus) stars, and switches and the rare all switch, ill come back to the switches latter.

The goal off the game is to be the first player to get 5 stars so you basically swap places to get the stars or to avoid getting minus stars or switches but you have a cool down on your switch so you can’t just switch all the time so it gets a bid tactical of when you want to use your switch.

This all sounds easy enough, but here is where the tricky part kicks in, the Switch concept, I deliberately explained player swapping as swapping and not switching to avoid confusion.

The 4-5 players all play on the same keyboard, each player have 1 up and 1 down button for swapping players, that might for example be Q & A for Player 1 (at this stage you have 4-5 x2 hands on the keyboard!,
And here is where the Switch pickups come into play, when your player hits a switch pickup one of your controls switches to an unbound key, f.eks. the A&Q player might switch to A & L and then after another switch it could be Y & L, this switch occurs quite rapidly throughout the game and with 8-10 hands on the keyboard it ends in quite a bit of fun and hectic chaos.

After we tried the game we gave some feedback, and I am looking forward to try the game again with the changes he decides to go with.
Sometimes simple games can be as fun as more advanced games and the sharing of keyboards really takes me back, it really adds a new or rather old dimension to games.

Also this is a good lead up to Nordic game Jam which is this coming weekend, unfortunately I’m not participating, but I have been quite impressed with the last few years participants the innovation and what they manage to create in such a short period of time, so can’t wait to see what comes out this year.