Gunhouse (PlayStation Vita)

Developed/Published by: Necrosoft
Released: January 15th, 2014
Completed: 31st January, 2014
Completion: It’s an endless game, but the story ends after day ten, so I called it a day there!
Trophies / Achievements: n/a

So! Gunhouse comes from the insides of the head of my pal Brandon Sheffield, so I feel like I can’t really critique his game honestly. Yep, that’s right chaps: CRONYISM. But I’m going to use it for everyone’s benefit, by using this spot to do a nice little design-heavy interview with Brandon, considering he’s easily accessible to me and that. So away we go.

Why is the house three by six?

The width and height of the puzzle area is determined by how much of the screen I thought I could devote to a puzzle section. In a game like 10,000,000 on iOS, you have most of the screen devoted to the puzzle, and very little to the art—which is okay, because the art is tiny pixels. But one of my aims with this game was to showcase Juan Ramirez’s art, because I quite like it, and we had a lot of other attempts previously, with completely different puzzle modes, that just made it too small. So I drew a Vita screen to scale, then tried to figure out how much space I could use. then I divided that space up into equal squares that I could actually get my index finger on without much trouble. That’s where it all came from!

If you have a block on one side or the other, you have the choice of sliding it whichever way it’s facing, as a special or a gun, or trying to turn it into a 3x2. I’m pretty satisfied with that as a tradeoff for beginning players, since once you’re more advanced, you can move that configuration of four tiny blocks over to the side *before* it becomes a big block, if you want. I think it leads to interesting thought processes that you don’t usually have in puzzle games. “Where do I want this to go?” is a question you only ask in games like Hexic and their ilk, but this one’s even simpler than that.

Wider definitely has way more issues, and narrower has zero strategy.

Why restrict the player to shifting left and right?

That came from two things. For one, I didn’t want to make a puzzle game that had been made before, because that’s boring, and I felt that within my 6 rows, 3 columns approach, I would have to come up with something new anyway. you can’t get much of a match 3 going when you have such a small playfield. The use of sliding and gravity, since you can slide between one and three segments out of the field at a time, lets you move everything on the field to anywhere you want, provided you have enough practice and can start to see the patterns. As a handy point of reference, any tetrominos one sees are easily turned into squares, simply due to how they’re constructed - so you can either wait for those to show up, or create them, then make squares and rectangles from that. Some people requested swapping, multi-directional shifting, and the like, but I was never interested in that, simply because of how much it’d been done before, and because it would make the puzzle so much more boring with its limited space. Ultimately I wanted a puzzle game that made you think differently, and I think this one does.

Also, sliding works really well with the loading guns/special weapons concept.

Why highlight two types of block and give them a boost?

That was to add more strategy - we wanted people to care more about which block they loaded and where, so we added “shapes” to the gun’s bullet patterns. The match blocks, as we call them, were to encourage people to care about when they load certain blocks. So if you care when and where you’re loading these blocks, you can actually plan a couple steps ahead, a la; “I know I can’t get that block in here right now, but I’m going to set it up for next time, and I’ll have a match right out of the gate.”

There are only three types of block on the playfield at a time. Why have five possible blocks?

That’s basically one of the biggest design flaws. We determined that that’s how many guns we would have (10), and then we randomised the guns that you’d get. But that was before upgrades and before the enemies moved in lanes, and before the guns had shapes, and it was a bit too late to change once the rest of that stuff came in. Right now what gun you have is randomised (I’ve determined that you can get through it with any combination though.) In an ideal world, you’d let people choose their three guns, and hopefully in the future we’ll be able to accommodate that. no promises though…

So, three types of blocks for a 3x6 space makes the most sense?

For the level of play we were seeing, yes. I personally liked 4 types of blocks, and we had that for a while, but it was to hard for basically everyone, so we scaled it back to three. But back when we had four types of blocks in one puzzle, you could also add small amounts of power to your guns by sliding in 2 or 3 small blocks. Getting rid of that was a good idea because people were just spamming with that, and not ever making big blocks.

Did you explore any other alternatives to big blocks of a different type replacing guns already in a slot?

We did consider having guns not replace each other, but simply add less ammo, and change the weapon type. We tried it, and found that people just didn’t care what they put where as much anymore, and also it made the game too easy, and we didn’t want to rebalance at that point. It felt more spammy, and less like you were making choices.

The building period ends with the shutter closing slowly. This tends to favour extra building at the last minute at the bottom. Intentional?

That was an idea of Jim’s - he thought it might be fun to have a frantic final moment to slide stuff in, which can be pretty compelling if you’ve got the right match on screen, or have been building let’s say a 2x5 block, and you just got it, but the bottom edge is still on screen, so you can slide the whole thing in. Those kinds of moments feel pretty good I think. I was worried about favouring the bottom there, but since you can also do specials, it’s not a big deal. Another thing I did to make the bottom row more important was dramatically up the HP of the basic minions, to make the bottom row one you care about a bit more. They have 30% more hp than flying enemies, for example.

Thanks again to Brandon Sheffield, who disagrees with me about Sonic 2 and finds “the tunnels more reactionary than memorisation-based.” He’s crazy!

Will I ever play it again? It’s endless! Maybe! Though I’d be more interested in playing a beefed up sequel.

Final Thought: One of the musical tracks by Disasterpeace put me right in mind of London Girl by the Pogues, for some reason.