Tiger Style's O'Connor asks: Why do scores only go up?

Randy O'Connor is an environment artist and designer at Tiger Style, of Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor and Waking Mars fame. If that weren't indie enough, O'Connor has also formed his own, even smaller studio, called Phoolish Games. Phoolish has just released its first title, Total Toadz, which O'Connor says was inspired by having to play FarmVille for a contract job. "I had to play the game as research for work at a company I used to work for," he tells me. "FarmVille was a decorator game with this fascinating concept of farming. But why did I have a score? I could click randomly on the screen once every minute and my score would go up eventually no matter what. I was annoyed that it didn't reflect growth in the player, just time investment. Wouldn't it be interesting to force a player to literally play their score?" Thus, with Total Toadz he ensured that players would have to actually pay attention to their score. The core mechanic is simple -- flick the tongues of one of three toads, to catch falling flies that have point values. But every time you catch a fly, the frog's polarity reverses. What's more, some flies have negative values, so you want to catch negative flies with negative frogs for a positive score. Or, if you're feeling cheeky, you can try to go for a negative leaderboard score. "I wanted to show players the numbers and have them add and subtract and multiply and divide," Says O'Connor. "Maybe the game gives them a bad situation and they have to subtract from their score, but that's what's fun about it. Deal with it, play as smart as you can, and move on." "When I think about Facebook games that I had to play for research, most of them rang hollow, I just didn't care about them. Nothing excited me mechanically. I think we should reward players, but not unnecessarily," he adds. "Why do we give them 'bonus' coins just for logging into the game? If that's how your game operates, I believe you've failed. And it's not like Total Toadz is mean about your score. If you care, then you will be rewarded by that score at the end of the game. You know you earned it, especially when things get really hectic as the game progresses." As the game speeds up, even that simple mechanic can get thrown out the window though, because if one fly drops past the frogs, it's game over. At some point you simply don't have time to think about the score. O'Connor isn't sure whether this is a problem. "What ends up happening is that you have people who care about the score (the programmer) and people who don't (his mom), and how do you tune the difficulty for both?" he poses. "You have to choose, so we chose for ourselves. We tuned the game so that it ramped up such that our inexperienced players trying to score well lasted a minute or so, and we could last several, maybe four or five minutes, as the best players." The endgame is essentially prolonged failure, but that was sort of the goal. "In my opinion, most of the successful quick-session mobile titles are focused on the end-game," he says. "Fruit Ninja ramps up super quickly, same with Doodle Jump. How long is a session in Canabalt? We need you to fail quickly, but fail because it's your fault, so after a minute, you have the time and energy for another try. The biggest problem is that our game has that visceral level, but also has to balance it against a mental mechanic." Though the game came from a fist-shaking opinion of simplistic Facebook games, it's been tough to gain traction for the game, partially because it has math symbols in it, which makes it look educational. The cute aesthetic makes the title seem youth-oriented, and I couldn't help but ask O'Connor how he arrived on that look. "People do recognize a dissonance between the aesthetic and the game's central mechanic," he admits. "Firstly, my natural art style is big and colorful and friendly, why not play to that? That's exactly the stuff that appeals to most audiences. I'm not opposed to kids playing the game, it's just not oriented only at them. Tiny Wings is an everyone game, it's not just for kids. But add math on top of a cute art style..." "I drew a bunch of aesthetic concepts, and this appealed the most to us," he adds. "We had abstract, purely technical art. We had a missile-command-like aesthetic, but then I tried personifying the elements, and it clicked. The idea of flicking tongues also appealed to Mike as a programming challenge. It's quite a task making the tongue move accurately and smoothly and still look good. You can't cut corners when you're visually representing a player's flick like that." Is a variable scoring mechanic enough to propel an otherwise simple-looking game to the top of the app charts? Not if people don't know about it, which is ever the curse of the indie iOS developer. But the experiment is an interesting one, if only to begin the discussion: Why don't more games allow negative scoring?