badger badger
a cute woodland tower defence game
overview
Keen to add new games to eyegazegames.com, the gamer’s charity Special Effect asked us to design more games that can be played using eye tracking technology. We pitched to them the game Badger Badger, a tower defence game that has you protecting Badger as she tries to get a good day’s sleep! Problem is, the other critters she shares the forest with have other ideas! You must set out towers and traps for them so that Badger can get all 40 of those precious winks.
squishing bugs
As you progress through the game, the number of critters you face increases. As this happens, the load on the CPU starts ramping up, particularly for those towers that have significant logic in their targeting. Balancing the accuracy and speed of the towers with the load it put on the CPU was a key technical challenge during production. To allow for quick iteration on game balancing, we set up a google sheet that could be adjusted by a designer and would be brought into early builds of the game at each load.
no nesting ui
As with all the games we have developed for playing with an eye gaze device, we had to take careful consideration in how the player is going to interact with the game. Dwell clicking is where a player looks at a button for a set period of time in order to select it. So it was important that our game had as few button presses as possible to get to the fun fast! The menu in the game dynamically updates based on where you are on the map so that options aren’t nested under button clicks. We avoided putting information on the buttons that helps a player make their next decision. Information such as the cost of a purchase or the ability of an upgrade is kept on non-interactable parts of the screen so that players can fully consider their options without the fear of accidently pressing anything!
result
We love a unique design challenge and all our work we have done with Special Effect for Eye Gaze Games has been just that! Oh and by the way, we have played a lot of this game now so if you’re getting stuck on a level, get in touch and maybe we’ll give you a hint or two!
