You know, fundamentally this is just the Snake game which people remember from FastTracker and their Nokia cell phones. But, there are some differences. Read on, diligent viewer, to see purty screen shots, and also to find out what the hell I’m talking about.

Flow is deeper than its ancestor Snake, even though it doesn’t add much by way of game mechanics. Flow is Jenova Chen’s thesis for a Master of Fine Arts degree. The thesis itself seems to be largely about applying Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow – that is to say, the critical area between boredom and anxiety – to gaming. The application of direct principle – especially the self mitigated difficulty factor – is in many ways impressive. It’s a shame that Chen is such a painfully obvious game design novice; there are simple critical flaws at the time of this writing which make this game suddenly turn frustrating about twenty minutes in. That said, until those problems hit, the design is positively exhilerating, which is weird, because it’s just Snake, for chrissakes.

The germane differences are as follows:

1. Boundless game world, with a camera which (badly) follows the player.
2. The things you’re eating are alive, and some of them fight back, using the same rules you use to eat them to in turn eat you.
3. There is a distinctly Rogue-like mechanism of depth, wherein as the player ascends or descends, new opponent creatures are added, which are progressively more difficult to handle. Some of these opponent creatures are in fact great fun to fight.
4. There’s a froody newage soundtrack which is complimented by atmospheric noises when things happen, such as competitive eating.
5. The credits are actually rendered as inline positioned non-elements within the game world, which is quite pretty once it stops being confusing. They also disappear after the first two levels, meaning they’re not obnoxious.
6. The game is rendered in a very attractive fashion using geometric creatures, yourself included, drawn in a way which makes me want to call them bug-fish. The layer immediately below you is rendered at a shrunken size, and blurred, which though not entirely a convincing visual effect, is positively gorgeous.
7. Entities on the current layer have a very faint aura effect, which is subtle enough that it took me a while to even notice it. However, once I noticed it, I realized that not only does it make the rendering easier on the eyes, but it also makes it easier to keep track of on-screen objects. I don’t understand why just yet.
8. As you grow, not only do you get longer, but you start developing somewhat bacteria-esque flagellae which speed you up.
9. Things frequently vary subtly in size or shape, which makes the visuals consistantly attractive and which staves off the visual feel of repetition ad nauseum so common in other games.
10. Fighting several enemies simultaneously is nearly impossible, so you have to use tactics to drag one enemy away from the herds that they tend to cluster in, and then kill it.
11. Some of the other animals eat the same things you do, and when they’re around, they scavenge your kills, introducing some strategy into fighting.
12. In the tradition of one-on-everyone combat games like sidescrollers and first person shooters, killing something gives you a direct reward. Since there’s nothing like ammo, corpses turn into food, meaning you can partially just up and eat your enemy.

Amazingly – at least to me – this makes for a very, very playable game. In fact, I found it borderline addictive within several minutes of play, something which is very rare for someone as jaded about games as I am. Unfortunately, there are a few problems so serious that I have a hard time playing it for long.

1. The game partially silently fails on Flash 7 or earlier, rendering none of the player and fractions of enemies. However, the failure isn’t obvious unless you’ve seen screenshots of the game in action. I almost gave up on this game before I started playing it, because I only had Flash 7 installed in Firefox; I tried it in IE out of curiosity, and since IE didn’t have flash installed at all I got the up to date plugin, which worked. This is a miserable design flaw, which people on the game’s forums repeatedly attribute to their browser or operating system. What’s worse is that version checking in Flash is trivially easy, and the authors are aware of the problem. This could be fixed, and needs to be.
2. Food sources are not replenished. Ever. After 20-30 minutes, you just get stuck. The first time I played I wandered around for almost an hour before realizing I was just screwed. Food should probably replenish on the layer to either side of you, not on the current level, so that new additions aren’t distracting (in fact, maybe two layers below, so that it doesn’t show up in the blurred layer either.)
3. The death food balance isn’t even. Instead, killing a creature releases less food than it consumed. The game is smart enough not to allow enemies to eat or to fight one another until you’re actually on the level they’re on, so showing the blurred layer doesn’t ruin the upcoming level. However, that blurred layer also gives you information, like how much food to expect when you get there. When you get down there, the enemies start snapping up food, only a small fraction of which is released when you get into murder mode. As a result, the player perpetually feels ripped off by a level that promised more food than it delivered. Rather than reducing the number of food given, as an encouragement to kill early and often, the value of the food released should be reduced. This is less an issue of actual food points gained and more an issue of “I saw fifty things and I only got to eat ten.” If the game balance is served by constantly reducing a level’s food quotient, it should be done by value instead of by count, so that the player’s brain doesn’t insist that 80% of the food it saw is missing.
4. As you wander away from the center of the map, things start to disappear. However, combat happens at very high speed and usually involves a chase; if the combat isn’t brief, it’s easy to get lost. There is no indicator of the direction back to the center, so either you wander around until you get lucky – often making it worse – or you start over.
5. The path between depths are special creatures which don’t serve as food, marked either red to move down or blue to move up. This in itself actually works very well, and confusingly, they are restocked, though the food supply isn’t. Unfortunately, it’s easy to trim that count down to one of each kind, and it often takes a few minutes just to find one. Especially when the food supply on a level is emptied and you can see a ton of food below you, this is extremely frustrating. A mechanism like John Sensebe’s Space Loonies, wherein things you’re looking for are indicated in location by an arrow at the edge of the screen, would be a god-send – two of them, one for up and the other for down. (If there are several, just point to the nearest one.)
6. There is an “eat time” involved when you consume something – you have to wait for the food point to get used before you can eat again. This time increases as you get bigger, and quickly becomes much too long. I’ve been in situations where I’m just swimming around a pile of food created by a destroyed enemy for three minutes or more, eating then waiting to be allowed to eat again. I could see a uniform flat pause of no more than a second, probably better around 2/3 of a second. I could even see an extended lag for the special food marked with a plus, which just instantly gives you a segment. But, this is just too long. It’s boring. By the time you’re done collecting your reward from combat, the rush is gone.
7. The player and creatures are “stunned” when a piece of them is eaten. When the player gets very long, it’s nearly impossible to fight certain kinds of enemy without losing a piece in the process. If the player loses two pieces concurrently, the stun becomes longer than an enemy’s eat time, and then you just can’t move, and have to watch your otherwise gigantic and healthy creature get eaten piece by piece. This is reminiscent of the Ice Monster problem in early versions of MAngband, wherein it took longer to recover from freeze than for the monster to freeze you again and wherein once frozen you have no resistance being re-frozen, leaving you unable to act until you died.
8. The camera routine attempts to lag behind the player’s movement, to make for a “natural” feeling of the window trying to keep up. Unfortunately, the implementation is low quality, and frequently leaves the player entirely off screen. This means either you have to blindly run, or you have to stop running to see yourself.
9. The player moves by putting the mouse in the line the creature should go. However, due to camera lag, there’s a wobble effect like putting a vase on a Lazy Susan – if the vase is sitting still, spinning the Lazy Susan has no effect, but if there’s any wobble it’s exaggerated until it falls over. The camera lags behind the creature, so the path of follow between the creature and the mouse cursor is altered, and changes in a direction which proceeds to do it again and again. This could be called an issue of skill, but that the camera frequently leaves the creature right up on the edge it’s trying to reach, it often makes it impossible to send the creature in the direction you want to go, because there is no location on screen which actually creates that line.
10. Combat with creatures of your own kind is nearly impossible unless there’s a serious difference in power between the two creatures, because of the follow effect – no matter where you hit the opponent, there is no way to get away efore your tail is in his strike range. This means that any attack you make at an opponent hurts you equally, and the only way to take out an enemy is a series of long distance sneak attacks, all of whom take forever and make it easy to lose your opponent. This is extremely not-fun. However, all other creature types have no such problem.
11. Creatures can hurt you whether or not they’ve been recently hurt. This makes the previous problem much worse. If there was a question of equianimity between player and enemy, then it should be both the player and the enemy who have to lag after getting hit. However, the enemies are temporarily invincible after being hit, because they essentially don’t fight each other, and you’ve got that eat time lag; no such protection is afforded to the player. An ideal repair would be to introduce a half second lag similar to the kind one expects of 8-bit era games while a creature is flashing, wherein the creature can neither hurt anything nor be hurt itself.
12. The screen is just too damned small, especially vertically. You can’t see where you’re going. There’s no mini-map or radar. You can’t find the stuff you’re supposed to be playing with. Frequently, you just accidentally hit a layer up or layer down creature, sending you out of the thing you were trying to do, because you just can’t see them in time. This problem is exacerbated by that the player tends to approach the side they’re moving towards, instead of the side they’re moving away from, meaning essentially your entire field of view is the stuff behind you. This is frustrating, unfair, and just amazingly bad design.
13. Creatures change color – white if they’re bored, orange if they’re attacking, or black if they’re being hurt. That on its own is actually very cool, and effective in the earlier layers. However, as the game progresses, the background turns from blue to black; this means that creatures being hurt get progressively more difficult to see. Though this can be argued as a game design facet, the problem is that there is no lag inbetween your hurting a creature and its ability to hurt you, even when it’s effectively disappeared, meaning any time you hit something you have to immediately run away, because the enemy’s mouth is god-knows-where. This is very frustrating, and impedes the prospect of constant combat. The aforementioned lag between taking a hit and being allowed to hit back would fix this, while allowing the disappear to continue – in fact, it would make the disappear a desirable thing, because then you wouldn’t have to sort out the visuals for non-active creatures. Because all creatures have the same base color, when creatures overlap you pretty much can’t see anything. A similar and complimentary repair would be to subtly vary creatures’ base colors, to the tune of things like #fcfffc instead of perfect white, so that they can be seen apart when overlapping but otherwise look roughly the same.
14. There is an infuriating camera bug after long combat when you just barely win, where the player wanders offscreen and never comes back. I’ve lost several creatures that were perfectly healthy this way. There is the appearance of the camera’s position polarity being reversed; it just goes the wrong direction. However, moving the mouse the wrong direction to compensate doesn’t seem to fix anything.
15. The eat radius at the mouth is too small. Sometimes you’ll pass 4/5 over a creature and not get it.
16. The presentation of the game involves a lot of border space, and the nature of the game involves lots of clicking. This means that hitting outside of the edges of the screen – especially common because of the camera bugs – loses you control of your bug.
17. Hello? Pause?

It’s a beautiful game, and has an obvious artist’s touch each to its appearance and its audio. The gameplay is designed by a talented academic amateur, who has the big picture issues dead-on, but who is missing virtually every possible subtle detail. The result is just heartbreaking: a game you really, really want to play, but just can’t.

Luckily, Jenova Chen says it’s a work in progress, and seems to be directly amenable to game repair issues, especially as presented in the forum. Moreover, the game release was on the day of this post, so this may just be alpha game syndrome. This work shows real promise, and if the various serious gameplay flaws are repaired, I see a long term coffee break addiction in the making.

Kudos, Jenova – you’ve done a damned good job on the game’s framework. Time to break out the brass polish.