7. Games
Games of resonance
Resonance explained
Game mode
From game play to analytics
Competitions
Game Development
- Rezzles: A puzzle of resonance: Can you maximize resonance with minimum moves?
- RezTet: A game of words in all the right places.
- Balloonatic: The speech balloon with a super-power: A shape-shifter that can get into almost anything.
- SpotBot: Can you spot the chatbot?
- FindRez KeepRez: A game of resonating revelations, inspired by Luis von Ahn's PeekaBoom.
- PokeRez: Play your Rez cards well to win the hand and take the jackpot.
- Memerez: The hunt is on for the most evocative resonance: The text that evokes its own context.
- Frog Bayou: A (non-violent) shooter game of frogs and flies, with a sharp-shooter tongue and hot-air balloons.
There are many ways to make games of resonance, and even more ways to play them.
The Rezonator project seeks insight into resonance itself. We build on the human perception of, and curiosity about, the structure and meaning of resonance in dialogue, as we seek to create:
- tools for visualizing resonance and engagement in dialogue
- a platform for creating a new kind of word game: games of resonance
- a new way of understanding involvement in human interaction
In Rezonator, games and analytical tools are linked by design. The objective of this writing is to show what Rezonator can offer as a game development platform, so we focus here on the principles that underlie Rezonator games.
As a game platform, Rezonator offers:
- intuitive visualization of resonance and other aspects of dialogue
- appealing and insightful game play
- tapping into the powerful human response to resonance
A key principle of Rezonator games concerns the power of resonance in interaction. For example, the foundation for a game may come from a set of two or more utterances (a "stack"). In Rezonator terminology, a "stack" is a series of utterances in a dialogue, selected for their coherence; for example, because they contain resonating words within parallel structures. In general, the lines in a stack are taken from authentic excerpts from naturally occurring dialogues. (Of course, sometimes they may be edited for clarity, or to preserve anonymity). The excerpts typically focus on the moment when one participant selectively reproduces the words and structures of their conversational partner. The result is a resonance between utterances: a mapping of the affinities (that is, the similarities and differences) between pairs of words, which create links between the two parallel sentences. Rezonator visualizes this by showing a line that connects the word pairs across two utterances. As the linking lines accumulate, little by little a picture emerges of a larger pattern of resonance. Once the resonance builds beyond a certain threshold, something new comes into play: The resonance starts to feed back on itself, reshaping the meanings of the words in context. When resonance passes this threshold of density and complexity, the resulting pattern can be called a "diagraph".
Taken together, the diagraph, as an intertwined complex of resonating elements, can become the basis for a challenge: a linguistic puzzle. When a player is shown half of a resonating exchange, can they find the other half? In Rezonator games, the game play often hinges on the fact that in some kinds of dialogue, you can almost hear the implied resonance. Encountering one utterance alone, even without its matching pair, you can still feel what must have been there, for the resonance to make sense. Reconstructing the original resonance becomes a mental puzzle; if the game is well designed, the puzzle becomes challenging, intuitive, and fun.
Sometimes the sequence of resonating utterances matters, so that only one order will "sound right". (This amounts to a test of pragmatic coherence.) The effect is noticeable, for example, in resonating sentences that contain the words too or either. In such cases, a parallelism in structure is make a certain organization of the structural resonance more or less obligatory. Examples of resonating utterance pairs in dialogue include:
A: I like that.
B: I like it too.
A: I miss you.
B: I miss you too.
A: I don't like those.
B: I don't either.
A: It's erasable.
B: I don't care if it's erasable.
In each case, only one sequence of sentences (A before B) is likely to occur in natural dialogue. Reversing the order of utterances (saying I miss you too before I miss you) creates an awkward conversational sequence, to say the least. But in other cases, it may be possible to have more than one ordering:
A: I think it's nice.
B: It is nice.
B: It is nice.
A: I think it's nice.
In some such dialogues, the difference between a natural-sounding exchange and one that sounds strange will often hinge on the use of intonation.
For linguists, paired utterances like the above can provide insight into the linguistic behavior of, for example, "additive particles" (such as too). For example, when one turn in a dialogue ends with the word too, only one ordering of the turns may be allowed. Thus, one can test whether the presence of particle like too can "coerce" a presupposition, or not. By building such dialogues into Rezonator games, linguists can test their hypotheses, based on the accumulated evidence of how players respond to the puzzles posed.
In game mode, the user plays a game (whether solo, multi-player, or online). Depending on what game has been selected to be played, one or more of the following options will be made available to the player, at the right moment in the sequence of game play.
| Move | Description |
|---|---|
| draw | Player selects a word (which may be masked or encrypted) to see and own. |
| move | Player takes their turn and makes a move or play. For example, player plays a box, with multiple resonance links between words, in pokeRez |
| dump | Player discards an unwanted card, word, or unit. |
| ship | Player submits a box (diagraph) to be evaluated and scored. |
| guess | Player guesses/predicts the value of a hidden word. |
| peek | Player looks at the value of a hidden word. |
| show | Player shows another player the value of a hidden word. |
| pass | Player chooses to not take a turn. |
| dice | Player rolls the virtual dice, to generate a random value |
| score | A score is calculated and applied to a player's move or hand. |
| win | The current round or game is won by a player |
Gaming. Gamers who have achieved a given level may earn access to certain "powers" that let them deploy automatic packing strategies.
In a typical Rezonator game (such as RezTet, under development), the game play hinges on getting players to:
- find which words resonate with which
- choose which ordering of two sentences in a dialogue makes more sense
- evaluate the coherence of the discourse
- not necessarily in this order!
All of this happens in real time, consciously or unconsciously, and usually quite fast. Meanwhile, the game is capturing detailed, play-by-play information about player actions, including the timing of every click (most of which represent perceptions and/or decisions about resonance and language).
The above example gives some idea of how resonance can provide a foundation for Rezonator game play. At the same time, capturing game play offers insight about players' decisions about what resonates and what does not. The combination opens up research possibilities which are limitless.
In other cases, resonance may be tied to emotion, sentiment, or laughter. The geography of emotion is reflected in Rezonator's "heat map" of cues to engagement, revealing the participants fluctuating levels of involvement in dialogic interaction. The inherent appeal of resonance in everyday conversation is the same appeal that drives the excitement of game play in that motivates people to play Rezonator games. Along the way, what Rezonator reveals can reward those who seek new insights about the role of resonance, emotion, and empathy in driving human engagement.
What makes Rezonator work, whether as a game or as a research tool, is its attention to how resonance shapes the meaning of choices people make. In Rezonator games, players are always presented with an array of choices. How they make their decisions reveals a lot about where and when they perceive resonance, and what means for emotion and meaning in interaction.
Rezonator is designed to scale up to crowd-sourcing levels, providing a rich array of information about player actions, decisions, and perceptions. The result is new kind of data and a new form of analytics: resonance analytics, which can provide invaluable information about the dynamics of human engagement.
For games in the Rezonator suite, we will invite competition, posting a leaderboard where players can track their highest scores, and see how they stack up against other players.
- Leaderboards: High scorers
- Teams
- Tournaments
- Rez du Jour; Rez of the Day, Week, Month, Year...
Contests and tournaments will be announced on the Rezonator website.
Contests may be managed using GameOn (Amazon).
This table provides a list of selected game features/functions to be developed.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Games | Rezzles, RezTet, Balloonatic, SpotBot, PokeRez, MemRez, Frog Bayou, etc. |
| Web | Develop a web-based framework for Rezonator games, central storage of game data, etc. Publish a web-based version of Rezonator, games, etc. |
| Teams | Build structure to support teams working together with Rezonator |
| Tournaments | Manage multi-player online games, central tournament management, prizes, etc. |
| Rez du Jour | A tournament of MemRez; MemRez of the Day, Week, Month, Year... |
This section describes the concept and game play behind several Rezonator games. At any given time, some of these may be under development by the Rezonator team.
A puzzle of resonance
Can you find maximum resonance in minimum moves?
Learning about resonance by solving puzzles can be fun. The idea of Rezzles is to create resonance puzzles: challenges for the player to solve, by finding the resonance in the most efficient way possible.
We use Rezonator to create the puzzles.
The resonance puzzles can be small and simple, or large and complex.
They can also be used as a kind of gamey tutorial for learning how to use Rezonator.
- The player is given a picture of the par for the course: the "ideal" Rezzles solution. This is like the picture on the cover of a jigsaw puzzle box, or the answer to a chess puzzle.
- The following screenshot shows a puzzle based on SBC009, lines 369-399. Try it out!
- As the starting point, the player is presented with a set of lines from this conversation, without the resonance marking. For example:
- Alternatively, the player might be shown the Stacks as a more colorful starting point, which also gives them some hints as to the solution:
- Use your knowledge of Rezonator moves to solve the puzzle (recreate the screenshot) in the fewest moves.
- How to score Rezzles is worth thinking about.
- It costs you one coin per click, and you win two coins for each link you create (or more?).
- But a QuickLink move still costs just one coin (maybe 2), and you can easily score 5, 10 or more links in one move, for a big boost in your score.
- Doing the moves strategically, in the right order, will win you a lot more points than just clicking one word at a time.
- Using QuickLinks to "over-resonate", and then making a few clicks to subtract the excess links, can also be a good strategy.
- When the user is done, they submit their answer, and get a response that shows what's right and what's wrong.
- There will be penalties for missing some resonance that was there in the original solution (the screenshot).
- Instead of presenting the above as one big puzzle, it would be easy to present as a series of 4 puzzles, each based on one stack. The stacks can be presented in order of difficulty, rather than conversation order. For example, the above stacks could be sequenced as: green, salmon, blue, violet.
- We can easily generate a large number of these puzzles. Players could go from one Stack (or group of Stacks) to the next, within a single conversation, to let them get a feel for the gist of the conversation, and to get to know the speakers.
- Confusing bits of the conversation can be left out, using the Stack system to carefully select which lines we want users to see.
- The goal would be to choose the Stacks carefully: interesting bits of conversation, with interesting (and progressively harder) resonance puzzles.
A game of words in all the right places
RezTet is a game of resonance played with words. It's a game of putting the words in their place. Start with a Rez Duet, putting two lines of a conversation into place. The pace heats up as you advance to Trio, Quartet, Quintet, Sextet and beyond. Hint: Rez is the key!
In RezTet, a line of words drifts into view from off-screen left. You guide the words into their proper place: move the line up or down, left or right. Push one word to the right to align it vertically -- or move a whole sequence of words to the right with one well-placed push. When game time's up, the winning combination maximizes rezonance, while minimizing empty cells. MaxRez!
The key to all games in the Rezonator suite is the language. In RezTet, the foundation for each game comes from a pair of lines (or a trio of lines, or a quartet...), each constituting a little language puzzle. Each set of sentences contains some parallel structures, along with some resonating words. The pairs of lines come from excerpts drawn from (or based on) authentic excerpts from naturally occurring conversation. Each pair represents a "diagraph", focusing on a moment where one participant selectively reproduces the words and structures of their conversational partner. The result is a resonance between utterances: a mapping of affinities between words that make up the two parallel sentences.
The game play builds on the fact that for some kinds of sentences, you can almost hear the other person resonating, even when you encounter just one sentence alone, without its matching pair. The order of sentences matters, and only one sequence will "sound right". This is noticeable, for example, in sentences containing the words too, either, and in some other sentence types as well.
In such cases, there is likely to be parallelism in structure, and resonance between pairs of words across the two sentences. Examples of resonating pairs of sentences include the following:
A: I like that.
B: I like it too.
A: I miss you.
B: I miss you too.
A: I don't like those.
B: I don't either.
A: It's erasable.
B: I don't care if it's erasable.
In the above cases, there is only one sequence of lines that is likely to occur; reversing the order of sentences (B before A) produces an awkward sequence, to say the least. But in other cases, more than one order may be possible:
A: I think it's nice.
B: It is nice.
B: It is nice.
A: I think it's nice.
(For a linguist, the last two pairs can be used to explore the difference between a presupposition and an additive: these allow both orderings, and thereby contrast with sentenece pairs containing too, which allow only one ordering).
This shows the kind of linguistic materials that are assembled to build the database that underlies game play. (It also gives some idea of the linguistic value that can be gained by finding out which pairs of sentences can occur in either order, and which can not.) The game play hinges on getting players to (1) evaluate the coherence of the discourse (choose which ordering of the two sentences makes more sense); and (2) match the words that resonate. When scaled up to crowd-sourcing levels, the results of the game play can provide valuable information about both aspects of linguistic engagement in conversation.
The basic screen layout is designed to work well on a phone held sideways (landscape). The screen layout is characterized by several zones that affect game play. The zones are horizontal bands across the screen, which may be displayed to the user via colored bars, or simply left invisible--to be discovered by the player via their behavior during game play. Visible or not, the horizontal bars may be referred to by their colors: from top to bottom, a band of red, then yellow, green, blue, green, yellow, and finally red). The yellow zone is for caution, while entering the red zone eliminates an element from the game. The middle band (blue and green zones) is safe, and where the main action is.
Speaker labels may appear, optionally, in the right margin of the screen, once a line of words is in place.
A line of words (one intonation unit, clause, or sentence) drifts slowly onto the screen from the left side, entering in the middle (blue) zone and moving horizontally to the right. Once the last word of the line arrives at the right margin of the screen, the line stops, leaving all the words visible, and right-aligned.
Then a second line, taken from the same conversational interaction (diagraph), drifts in from the left of the screen. But does it precede or follow the first line? This is the player's first dilemma. Using swipe gestures (or arrow keys), the player bumps the rightward-drifting line up a few times to guide it into place as the first line of the conversation. Alternatively, the player bumps it down a notch or two to guide it into second position. By the time the line hits the right margin, it is locked into place, for better or worse. Some orderings are "correct", while others are not; in some cases, either is accceptable.
To reject a line, expelling it from game play, the player bumps the entering line up, moving it up and up until it enters the yellow zone, and finally the red zone. Once it touches the red zone, it explodes and disappears. Since some of the entering lines are chosen by Rezonator at random (i.e., taken from a different conversation, with no obvious connection to the current conversation, and little prospects for resonance), rejecting such a line can be a good move.
Once a pair of lines has been accepted and locked into one sequence or the other, there is a small explosion that sends the lines flying up into the air, off the screen for a moment; at which point they come falling down from above. Now the task is to line up the words that resonate, matching a word in one line to a word in another. To move a word, the player touches it and gestures to the left or the right. Moving the rightmost words one square to the right just moves the one word; but moving the leftmost word one square to the right pushes all the other words along in front of it.
Once the player has maximized resonance (or when time runs out in the round, whichever comes first), the result is a diagraph, which is packed, shipped, and scored.
Immediately, the next round begins, within the same level of difficulty at first.
But after a string of successes. the player advances to the next level. The difficulty of each new puzzle (diagraph), and/or the speed of the game play, gradually increase over time.
RezTet starts out simple, but allows for innumerable variations, limited only by the game designer's imagination: New forms of game play, higher levels, new media, new languages, new linguistic puzzles... The possibilities are limitless.
For the linguist, the kinds of linguistic structures is equally open-ended, allowing for studies of coherence, resonance, priming, anaphora, presupposition, additives, scalars, coercion, adjacency pairs, and many more topics of interest.
Speech balloons with super-powers!
In Balloonatic, the speech balloon is central to the game play. It has a super-power: it's shape-shifter that can get into almost anything.
Because of its unique visuals, capabilities, and functionality, the speech balloon is in effect a game character in its own right, with extraordinary powers.
- The speech balloon is a powerful shape-shifter: It can change its shape easily, as needed, in order to solve problems in its environment.
- The speech balloon is richly animated, preferably using bones in Spine.
- Capabilities. When necessary, the speech balloon can squeeze through a small space, such as the keyhole to a door, and regain its original shape on the other side.
- But if the speech balloon gets squeezed too tight, it might leak or pop, losing some or all of the words it contains.
- The speech balloon can move like an amoeba, engulfing another word by reforming itself like a mouth to surround it. If the amoeba-mouth closes over the word, it captures it, and adds it to its store of words.
- Words can be added to the "bag-of-thoughts", which is a thought-balloon (distinguished by its puffy cloud=edges, and dot-dot-dot style of speech attribution line).
- You can collect the words you encounter in:
- a bag of thoughts: Not yet activated as words, but ready for your next dialogue encounter with another balloon
- a bag of tunes: punctuation marks like period, commma, question mark, that are necessary to complete a sentence and activate the full power of your speech balloon
- a bag of words (?)
- When two balloons meet, they may try to make a "dialogue", resonating their words. Each balloon is distorted a little, as the resonating words come closer to each other, while the non-resonating words remain a little farther away. With enough resonating words in a dialogue, you might gain enough power for a hot-air balloon that will transport you up to the next game level.
- If the words in your balloon get squeezed too much, they might get scrambled. If you can find the right dictionary, it can help you unscramble them.
- Some more adventures:
- Climb Mount Thesaurus
- Lookup Hookup in the Dictionary maze
- Escape from the Diction Dungeon
Can you spot the Bot?
SpotBot is a game about spotting the Bot that's trying to get into your conversation, imitating your friend. Can you tell a friend from a Bot? (If not, maybe you need a new friend....)
The game builds on very short dialogues, such as a question-and-answer exchange. It is based on real excerpts from a corpus of authentic conversations. (The initial game will use excerpts from the Santa Barbara Corpus.)
- A character appears on the left of your screen. This is your character, the first speaker. A cartoon balloon appears, showing the first line of a dialogue. In it, your character asks a question, or makes a statement. (This is provided for you by the game, based on a real question/statement in a real conversation.)
- A second character appears on the right of your screen, but his/her face is hidden for now. A balloon appears, showing this character's response to your character.
- Below the second character appear two faces: Friend, and Bot.
- Friend: A sprite representing a friend of the first speaker, bearing a flower
- Bot: A sprite of a Bot, representing a ChatBot which is trying to make you think it's human
- Your task is to unmask: To say if the second speaker is Friend or Bot, real or fake.
- The Friend represents second speaker (responder) in the original conversation
- The Bot represents a ChatBot using Artificial Intelligence to generate an appropriate response to the question or statement.
- Alternatively, in a "Wizard of Oz" scenario, the so-called Bot may be a simulation of a ChatBot (while in fact it is a human that produces the response).
- When you figure out whether it's real or fake, you choose the corresponding face, and drag it to the avatar of the 2nd speaker.
- If you got the answer right:
- If it's the Friend, the Friend's head reunites with the body, bobbles in a friendly way, and you get the flower
- If it's the Bot, the Bot is exposed as a fake, and slinks away in shame.
- If you got the answer wrong:
- If you said it was the Friend, but it's really the Bot, the Bot pulls off his Friend mask and gives a fiendish laugh
- If you said it was a Bot, but it's really your Friend, the Friend glares at you, crosses his arms, shakes his head, and taps his foot in anger.
- Your score goes up or down accordingly.
- The game of SpotBot relies on a "gold standard" of real conversational exchanges, which supplies the "correct" answers. At least initially, the gold standard will come from small Stacks (two-turn exchanges between two speakers), drawn from the Santa Barbara Corpus, that are marked as interesting by Rezonator analysts.
- The game will provide some initial examples, demos, or tutorials, illustrating what counts as a good answer, as determined in advance by the Gold standard markup.
- Instead of presenting the player with two heads to choose from, there may be 3 or 4. In addition to the Friend and Bot avatars, there may be:
- "Rogue": A random speaker from another conversation, who speaks a random sentence from that conversation. It's not likely that there will be any resonance or ever relevance to the original conversation, so it should be easy to spot.
- "Dope": A random sentence by the original respondent from elsewhere in the original conversation. The voice, style, and the general topic may sound right, but the resonance and relevance are not likely to be what you expect. A little harder to spot, but mostly not too hard.
- "Troll": An obnoxious intervenor, looking to provoke and annoy. Call him out (but don't make a mistake and call your friend a Troll!)
- Voice. While the standard version of SpotBot is text-based, the Voice version introduces a higher level of technical challenge, as it involves audible speech. To match the voice and speech of the original participants is a real challenge; even more challenging is to get the intonation/prosody right.
- The materials to be tested (for the Bot response) may be done by speech synthesis, etc. With phones and prosody, for a real challenge
- Another path is to resynthesize the speech, starting from the speech and voice of the original respondent. This allows the researcher to manipulate the intonation, testing how much it can change before it's perceived as inappropriate (triggering a "Bot" response from players).
- Researchers and companies that are trying to develop high-quality ChatBots or other agents, whether text-based or voice-based, will stand to benefit by putting their Bot to the test: Can the players of SpotBot spot their Bot as a fake? Or will they take him as a Friend? SpotBot players have no reason to cut you any slack, or do you any favors; so the accumulated data will swiftly provide the acid test for success or failure.
- A good starting point might be to test some of the following ChatBot interactions:
Additional context
- For general information, see Games.
To keep your Rez, help your partner find it!
FindRez KeepRez is a collaborative game that calls on two players' ability to coordinate their discoveries of words that resonate in a conversation.
FindRez KeepRez is about finding resonance in conversation; but you only get to keep your Rez points if your idea of what resonates matches the idea or your hidden partner.
- You've been randomly assigned to partner with a stranger on the web.
- Each of you is given the same Stack to work with. You begin with a simple Stack, containing 2 lines, which contains lots of resonance between the lines.
- You have to decide which word in line 1 resonates with which word in line 2.
- You and your partner only score maximum points if you come to the same conclusion regarding the resonance.
- One word at a time, reveal your hidden Rez links to your partner, to see if you agree!
- For the initial tutorials, which explain to players how the game works, what counts as resonance will be determined in advance by the Gold standard markup.
Game play: Hidden resonance
- You are paired with a partner, who has to guess how two lines of words resonate: Which word matches with which? The catch is, they can't actually see what the words are, because the letters are hidden, masked, or encoded in cryptic symbols. Only the shape, number, and order of words remains.
- But you can see the words, so you know what resonates. Your job is to help your partner, revealing one word at a time -- before they get to peek. After the peek, you find out if your partner succeeds -- if so, you both succeed.
- So the strategy comes down to this: Which is the most useful word you can pick, to help your partner make the best guess and the quickest progress?
Credits
FindRez KeepRez is inspired by Peekaboom, a Game With A Purpose (by von Ahn, Liu & Blum):
Peekaboom slides
Peekaboom paper
Play a hand of words, to win the jackpot.
- Shuffle the cards (lines) in the deck well.
- Deal the cards to the players - from the top of the deck, please!
- Draw your cards to make a good hand.
- Play your best matching cards (resonating lines) for the highest score.
- Discard a line, but not one that will get picked up by your opponent.
- When your hand wins, collect your chips.
A game of memories, memes, and strategies
The words ring out with an echo, calling to mind the memorable words of a famous poet, singer, actor, celebrity, writer, rhetorician, politician, activist, leader, or prophet. Can you find a present text with the power to recall its own prior text? How can a few words call up a cultural memory, for you and others who make up your community of discourse? How will you recognize it as a resonance?
In Memerez, the player tunes in to the text that evoke its own context. The search is on to find the deepest resonance, the richest links, between the words without and the words within. Who but you will hear the same echo? Once you find it, can you map out its resonance? The hunt is on. Tune in to see what today's catch has brought from around the internet. Pit your favorite Memerez against the best of the rest.
How to play? Go forth and seek your best evocative text: a headline, a line from a song, poem, or film, a book title, your friend's pun, a joke or a movie quote spoken in conversation with friends: anything that evokes a prior text you can cite. Then:
- capture the now text, image and all
- bring back the then text, from (cultural) memory
- show the resonance and how it points back from now to then
- take us from present to past and back, via the prior text
- share your discovery with the community of Rezonators
- win fame and fortune (well at least fame for a day)
Using the wondrous tools of Rezonator,
- capture the quote or image of the present text (the now text)
- markup the resonating words (the evocative words of your quote, headline, image, pun...)
- supply the (invisible) words of the prior text (the then text), writing them in Rezonator
- map out the resonance that links present and past: mark the matching or resonating words
What's the score? Things to consider in the quest for the five stars of glory:
- resonance: How intense is the resonance?
- humor: How funny?
- quality: How well does it serve its intended purpose? Does it bring something new, a twist of its own?
- headline: Does it grab your attention, make you want to know more?
- joke: Does it make you smile or laugh?
- quote: Does it evoke a larger meaning, make you think deeper?
- persuasion: Does it make you want to join in the (implicit) stance of the resonating text?
What is the genre? (to make sure your Memerez gets to the right context/contest)
- song/poem
- movie/TV/media/book
- ad/slogan
- headline/news
- joke/pun
- meme (image + text = Memerez!)
- persuasion/recruitment
- conversation
- other
Who is it for? Who represents the target community for your Memerez? Who "gets it"?
A tongue-shooter game of Frogs and Bugs
Frog Bayou is a new twist on a very familiar game type -- the shooter game. In the tried-and-true shooter game, you are shooting space rocks, aliens, or people. But here, nobody gets hurt. The idea is to shoot the breeze - that is, to shoot the words, using your tongue. And if you're a frog, your tongue is very long indeed.
You might kill a few bugs along the way--everybody's got to eat-- but no humans were harmed to make this game. Also, you get to keep what you shoot--bugs--which turn out to be words in disguise.
There are lots of visual and verbal puns going on, the main one being that speech balloons can be turned into hot-air balloons, allowing travel into the clouds.
These and many other wonderful things happen only in Frog Bayou.
This is a tongue-shooter game, centered on the marvelous feats of Frog, the Player who can shoot his/her sticky tongue to grab a Bug out of the air, pull it back in, and swallow it. The place is Frog Bayou, with swamp water, land, plenty of bugs and other animals, and the open sky and clouds above. The characters and themes include the following:
- Frogs, who are good at leaping on land or into the air, swimming in the water, and most of all, shooting their long tongue at passing Bugs, to grab and swallow them.
- Balloons are of many kinds, all designed to contain words or punctuation, with a callout line to point to the Frog who says the word. Like a cartoon balloon, with a solid line for attribution.
- word balloon: a balloon with one word, plus a callout line (but alone, it lacks a Point!)
- thought balloon: a word in a cloud, with bubbles to show whose thought it is.
- punctuation balloon: a special kind of balloon, consisting of a punctuation mark, which lets you turn a series of words into a sentence, for much greater value.
- speech balloon: A Balloon with multiple words plus a point (period or question mark), to form a complete sentence.
- hot-air balloons: a bunch of word balloons gathered together in a rope net, with a passenger basket hanging below, which can create enough lift (if powered by enough word-balloons) to let a Frog fly up into the clouds.
- fart balloon: When you need to discard, it goes out the other end, and dissipates into the air (unless your fart balloon is snatched up by a Stink-Beetle)
- Bugs. The greatest source of words is Bugs, of various kinds:
- Flies, who turn out to be Words in disguise. When a Frog swallows a Fly, he can think it as a Thought balloon, or burp it out as a Word Balloon.
- Each fly has one word. You may not know which word it is until you grab it with your tongue (unless you have a pair of Froggles, see below).
- Fireflies flash their light on and off. When it's on, you can see which word the the firefly carries; when it's off, you can't.
- Each gnat has one letter. Gnats come in big swarms, and a frog's tongue might grab several gnats on a single shot.
- Dragonflies, scorpions, and lady bugs are special bugs that are worth looking for. Each one carries a Point, without which your words can't make a proper sentence for your dialogue.
- Dragonfly = Period or Exclamation point; Scorpion = Question-mark; Lady-bug = comma.
- Butterflies are important, because by collecting a lowly caterpillar you can later turn it into a beautiful butterfly: a wild card word that lets you complete your sentence, or make your Point.
- Stink-beetle: Fart-snatcher extraordinaire
- Other critters that compete with you (or help you) to collect words:
- Skinks have long tongues too, and compete with Frogs to grab the Flies/Words
- Toads grab words and store their words as Warts on their skin. Pop a Toad's warts and grab their Words.
- Archer fish shoot a stream of water from the swamp, knocking a Frog's word balloon out of the air, making if fall into the water, where they snatch it up.
- Snakes have a forked tongue: If they can grab a Word on each tongue, they can resonate with themselves, scoring Chat points (dialogue Rez points).
- Birds like to dive-bomb a word balloon when it floats into the sky, popping one word balloon with each hit, and lessening the lift of your Balloon Craft until you fall from the sky - unless you can take evasive action.
- Crows pop your balloons for the fun of it - they're a hazard
- Magpies and parrots scoop up the words, because they know how to use words to talk
- Anteaters might try to use their long tongues to get flies/words, but they're really better at eating ants.
- Wart Hogs: Not sure what they do, besides chasing after the Warts on Toads to steal their words.
- Loot to look for and keep, that give you special powers:
- Froggles: These are special goggles that a Frog can wear, that let him see farther or in slow motion, and give his tongue greater accuracy in targeting a Fly
- X-Ray vision: If properly energized, the Froggles give you X-Ray vision that lets you see which word a fly contains.
- Ropes: A kit with ropes for the passenger basket, and a rope-net for gathering up your word balloons into a Hot-Air Balloon, to take you up into the clouds
- Basket: A passenger basket attached to the bottom of your Balloon Net, so you can ride into the clouds above.
- Caterpillar wig: A wild-looking wig (Einstein or Beethoven style) that a Frog can wear to store his caterpillars, which come in handy when you need them most.
- Beetle Farm: a way to recapture the words collected by the Stink-Beetles.
- Word storage: Frog, toads, skinks, etc. can store the words they capture, for when they encounter a Chat (dialogue) opportunity. You can't make a point if you don't have the words.
- Point balloons: a period, question mark, or exclamation point is required to complete your Point, in order to get full credit from the words you put together to make a sentence. Without a Point, you get only reduced points.
- A comma is a special kind of Point, which lets you string together multiple Sentence balloons, for more points. Very valuable, it makes a multiplier effect. But you still need a point, to complete the last balloon in your sequence.
- Chat: From time to time, you find yourself in a Chat Match -- a dialogue game where you try to match words for Rez points -- with another Frog, or with another Bayou critter. Since it's a cooperative game, more resonance equals more opportunities for all.
- Many more details of game play are needed -- to be decided.
Scoring
- More words, more points, more dialogue gets more points.
- Resonance matters, too. How? Not so clear how to score this, but we may be able to build on the concepts and data from RezTet (#123 ).
- Multiplier effects make it interesting: Multi-balloon sentences, resonating conversations, etc.
Alternatives (or other levels)
- At higher levels, frogs can leap and shoot at the same time: for example, leaping high to shoot through a small opening with their tongue.
- Frogs can leap into the clouds, a kind of platformer function.
- Or they can hitch a ride on a passing hot-air balloon.
Additional context For a basic starter, see YoYo Games tutorials, etc:
Of course, our goal is to go beyond these basic models.