Orca vs. Great White

Simplifying

Sort of. The underlying complexity of the fish, sharks, and dolphins, is large. There are many parameters which will effectively govern gameplay and lend to the unique qualities of each battle. For example, there are hydrodynamic drag coefficients which are different for the different sharks. Watch the dogfish and black tip shark carefully in the game. As in real life, a confluence of their body shapes and relatively smaller size gives them incredible maneuverability. They can turn on a dime, but still be "skidding" underwater (this means their orthogonal velocity overcomes the drag forces). Think in skiing of a long slide vs. a quick power slide to change direction.

If you "know" these pieces of information, they help you in battling the various enemies. But what became very clear during production, is that you can never really understand them cognitively/consciously. But you do intuitively learn them - and adapt seamlessly. That's our "sweet spot", where you're enjoying, practically understanding (in-game), and taking advantage of the complexity, but its all intuitive and subconscious - you don't know you're doing it. When an animal hunts or is hunted in real life, during the adrenaline rush, it is capable of incredible feats. Pilots and extreme athletes talk about this- making insanely fast decisions, executing complex maneuvers that seem impossible, etc. We tried as best we could, and with the limitations we had, to replicate a small part of this type of experience; namely, it just all comes together in your brain, and you do very cool things.

So back to your question - in the beginning we thought a lot of gamers would really like all of these statistics - your speed, maneuverability, etc., to know before they entered a battle. Ultimately, we found that these factors have a deep impact, but at an emotional/experience level during gameplay. They confer no more enjoyment beforehand. So yes, we simplified what you read about the creatures before entering battles.

Having that said, we do plan on having far more elaborate information on each of the fish, sharks, and dolphins, more about their protocols and locomotion, on the website.

Your and your enemies "health" and "attack" are processed as "how many lives to I have and how many lives does the enemy have". A younger tester made us aware of this early on - when he would keep asking this question before entering a battle. So we tried it out and everyone seemed to like it. Before the "hearts" we had a more traditional "Attack" and "Health".

Also, and this is a very important point: The progression in the game is centered around your-actual motor skill improvement. We did, after all, come out of the world's preeminent motor-learning laboratory at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (www.blam-lab.org). The feeling is stark. Your character is progressing because you are progressing. While this is true to some extent in most games, its effect is arguably larger in ours because we designed it that way. I think in the long run, this type of character progression, if done right, is far more rewarding than a forced one (increasing health and attack etc., and modulating between you and your enemies). Again, however, a balance is necessary to appeal to lots of people. I do want to put "power-ups" (no IAp, ever, the 2.99 price will give you all updates forever. I feel that's more than a fair price for everything we are putting in, and planning on putting in), where you have, for example, a sonic burst or something that has to be timed to an enemies attack. This will be rewarded to the player with progression in game.


I've tried to make this game appeal to everyone : casual gamers, hardcore gamers, and non-gamers. We have had a lot of success with the non-gamers, surprisingly. Our beta group included people ages 4 to 94. Every single one figured it out, and got really addicted. A world renowned and famous expert on dolphin intelligence emailed me an hour ago saying she missed the bus while hunting down two mullets . She is a non-gamer. The hardcore gamers love the challenge of the extreme-cards, and email/text me about their tactics . The hardcore gamers will probably like to learn more information on each of their battles, and I'd like to provide it.

What we're finding is that people bring new tactics to each of the enemies. The system is very emergent because its entirely physics driven for motion and probabilistically driven for the Ai. So I don't even know what will happen.

 

A great review of the game:

http://www.appunwrapper.com/2014/10/06/i-am-dolphin-ios-simulation-game-allows-you-to-become-a-dolphin/

"I got my hands on the beta version of the game, and it’s incredibly impressive and addictive. I spent two hours playing right off the bat without even realizing it, and have put in quite a few more hours since. I just keep wanting to come back to it."

 

Could you clarify what you mean?

 

Ah- Thank you kindly for this explanation.

 

submission status

I Am Dolphin is approved and will be on sale on October 9th.

 

A good summary by JHU of the game, the deeper science/medicine behind the project, and a nice list at the bottom of lots of press we've gotten:

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/becoming_the_dolphin

 

early bandit

Thank you!