Candy Catcher

Prompt 2:

This game want me to lose because it seems to be an easy game of counting the candy canes. However, what appears to be easy is in fact every hard to play. The mechanic is simple, clicking on the candy cane to count them within 3 seconds, but with the fast pace of the moving candy cane and player’s slow reaction time, it makes this game impossible to win (count all the candy canes). The player needs to be super fast on clicking the candy cane on screen as well as hitting on it at the right spot since the candy cane is tiny. I guess the game didn’t anticipate my moves, and there’s no enemy (or maybe the enemy is speed and timing). Again, the force that makes the game difficult is the speed and timing. The best score I got so far is 3, and I felt it is nearly impossible to count all candy canes in 3 seconds. The obsticle is very concrete in my opinion, it is very obvious that the player can’t keep up with the speed. I don’t think anything in the game is helping by how simple it is. All players could do is trying to click on as many candy canes as possible within 3 seconds. With my trackpad, it makes it even harder because there’s a delay while I move the pointer on the screen. As a player, I kept pushing myself to try to get as many as I possibly could, but it is still a “mission impossible”. 

Prompt 3: Describe an interesting moment of interplay.

The core verb for this game is to catch the candies. Players have to catch candy canes as many as they can in three seconds. When the player clicks on a candy cane, it disappears from the screen, and the score is added, meaning that the player catches it. After catching a candy, the player needs to react quickly and click the next one. Most of the candies will fall from above at different speeds. There are two candies with unique movements, and they fly from the left and right sides of the screen to the opposite side individually. The first time I played, I didn't catch any candy because I didn't know where they were from and where to move. But because the candy appears in the same way and the same position each time, players can more easily succeed in getting higher scores. While players are catching a candy, they need to observe the next target candy's location quickly. Each candy's speed is different, some are fast, and some are slow, so players need to click and observe at the same time.A three-second countdown will appear in the game. By counting down to three, two, one, tells the player that the game begins and should be operated. At the same time, the remaining time of the game shown on the screen increases the game's tension. However, when the player's attention is on one candy, other fast-moving candies will interfere with the view and make the game more challenging. And the game time is very short, the number of candies is much more significant than the number of players can catch, which makes players feel in a new danger.