Procedural Dart Gun Madness
Super Darts
Genre: FPS
Played: 20,000,000 Times
Published: 2020
Simple Progression based gameplay
Super darts has a simple gameplay loop: get blaster, go blast players to get money to get a better blaster to blast more players. My explicit goal was to create a game that I could commercialize and fall back on as a livelihood if I wanted, and to that end I focused on making the game as content rich and accessible as possible to all players.
Content is always the hardest part
One major goal was to solve the problem of making sustainable content for a game using procedural generation. I was really unhappy with my job at the time and creating a game that I could make a living off of was a very appealing concept. In order to have that I was going to need to make enough content to keep players coming back, while not giving it to them so slowly that they got bored.
I attempted to solve this problem by breaking the game down into grammars that could be recombined later. This went for both the maps and the blasters themselves.
The maps used a system of footprint based composition where chunks would be filled out recursively until there were no black spaces left.
The blasters worked much the same way, but with more constraints. Start with the receiver and fill out each component from there. Each component would add it’s own statistics to the full blaster, so a longer barrel might make it more accurate, and an attached tank of gas might make the darts go faster. Then based on the stats of the weapon it would be assigned a “level score” which determined approximately how good the weapon was. Then all of the blasters for a season could be sorted and assigned a level value from 1-100 based on their order to create progression.
Progression + accessibility = success
Unlike most of my other games my goal was to make a game that would be successful rather than one that I just wanted to make / play. To that end I made sure to add full mobile support (as the majority of Roblox players play on phone / tablet) as well as lots of alternate progression, such as “skins” which were just recolored variants of each blaster. This insured that not matter where you were at in the game you were always unlocking something.
The game was also set up to have “Seasons” where I would regenerate a new set of 100 blasters and add more content. This meant that even if you reached the end of the current season you were only a couple of months away from new content.
