On My Mind is a game that I made for January’s Experimental Game Project theme, “100 Things.” I had been wanting to make a meditation-based game for a while, and felt that I could combine three goals in one: participating in the EGP, making a meditation game, and learning the game engine LÖVE.

I fit the game into the “100 Things” theme by having 100 thoughts going through my head. The thoughts are largely representative, albeit sometimes in an abstract way, of thoughts that might go through my head.

For the gameplay, I didn’t want to have much of a goal, nor have the player actually “win,” because awareness meditation is not about calming the mind nor focusing on anything specific; rather, it’s just about being aware. I tried to have the gameplay reflect this concept… I had to balance actually having interaction with penalizing the player for too much interaction, and at the same time trying to keep the game from being too frustrating. If you win the game, the man on the screen smiles; if you lose, he frowns because he has become “too distracted.”

LÖVE turned out to be pretty darn cool. It has limitations that a more complicated game might run into, but worked great for me. The biggest hurdle for me is that the LÖVE documentation is not that great, and the forums are very difficult to search, with terms like “audio” being cut from the search because they are “too common.” One thing that I like about the engine is that it’s cross-platform, so I was able to make a Windows and Mac version. Unfortunately, to distribute a stand-alone application you have to package the entire LÖVE application with your game, which gives the end user a security warning on Windows and a much larger than necessary file for Mac users.

What went right:

- Development time. The amount of time allowed for EGP theme games is 7 days, and that’s about what it took me. At least half of that time was used in creating the art assets.

- Frustration, or lack thereof. I haven’t received a lot of feedback, so I could be wrong about this, but I think I found the right amount of negative response to player actions so that they lose the game very quickly and realize that their strategy didn’t work, and once they learn the mechanic, the game gets slightly harder but not hard enough that they’ll lose.

- Sound effects. Aside from the occasional glitch (that I blame LÖVE for), I’m very satisfied with the audio, I think it helps to add a layer of calm and contentment.

What went wrong

- Missing thoughts. I chose to use photographs instead of drawing the thoughts because I assumed it would take less time. The initial list of thoughts that I came up with turned out to be difficult to take photos of, and I struggled to come up with the last few photos, so some of them are kind of lame. For instance, there is both a photo of a snow-covered branch and also an image of a snowflake. Ideally, there would have been greater diversity.

- Length. It takes about 5-7 minutes to beat the game, which is a long time considering that once you figure out how to play, it’s the same thing over and over. The thoughts are not quite entertaining enough to look at that they will keep most people’s interest, so to actually beat the game requires commitment. The easiest way to solve this would have been to cut back the number of thoughts, but that wouldn’t have fit the “100 Things” theme.