Friday, June 27, 2014

What makes Super Hexagon good?

I hate Flappy Bird.
My friend loves it. He still plays it when he's bored.

He told me about Super Hexagon, and I thought it must be similar to Flappy Bird because "you die too often". When I told my friend that people generally hate games where they die too fast, my friend said "Dying too fast doesn't mean the game is not fun."

After I tried playing Super Hexagon, I understand why he said that.

But Super Hexagon is very very different from Flappy Bird. I don't hate Super Hexagon.
And while trying to identify the reasons for not hating the game, I  realized the good things about the design of that game, Super Hexagon.

After I played the game, I tried to find online articles that might explain how the game is fun from the design aspect or anything, but most of the articles don't give me much information. But most of them agree on one thing.

Super Hexagon is fun because it's hypnotic.
Eventually you'll be in a state of trance and you don't even think when you're playing. You will move your finger sub-consciously, as if you're dreaming. This is actually quite therapeutic.

Super Hexagon is fun because it allows steep learning curve, and it makes player feel good about it.

But other than those things, I want to discuss in more details about the components that the game has, that result in those fun factors. I tried several other Super Hexagon rip-offs (because they're free) and most of them suck big time. I tried to identify why.

Super hexagon is hypnotic because:
1. The area is divided into six, and it's rotating, almost as if it's trying to hypnotize you.


Most of the rip-offs get this right. To make a game like Super Hexagon, you need to hypnotize people. How do you do that? You try to make that hypnotizing gesture right in front of the player. Of course, not everybody understands that.

For example, this game is called Spiral Pulse. It has the same mechanic.


The only thing that is changing is only the colour. It fails its attempt to be hypnotizing to the player.

Failed.






 2. Not only the background that is of different shades. Even the hexagon itself is in different shades of colour.
This, along with the hexagon pulsing, gives an even more hypnotizing effect to the player. However, none of the rip-offs I found realized this.

3. Instant restart
When you die, you just need to tap to restart the stage. This results in continuous state of trance. When you have freed your mind and it became blank, the idea of using one tap to continue being in that state is brilliant. Sometimes you don't even feel like you died. It feels like it's just part of the game. I would even tend to tap to restart instead of stop playing.

Compared to Flappy Bird, you need to start flying for a few times before you encounter the first pipe. After you die, you still need to tap a few times before you see a pipe. I find that few taps quite disruptive (but it's not like Flappy Bird gives me hypnotic feeling or something)

Most of the games similar to Super Hexagon also understand this. Most of them only need one tap for you to restart the game. However, it's very important to take note on how you tap.

Having a "restart" button at the center is very annoying, because you're playing the game with your thumbs. Sometimes the thumb is not long enough to reach the center of the phone just to restart the thing.

Super Hexagon, instead, implements the "tap anywhere to restart" to make it easy for the player to just play the game. They don't even need to think.



4. Trance music
The music in Super Hexagon is well-thought. Although it's not a rhythm game and supposedly the music is not really related to the speed of the hexagon, I do believe they have a relation. The hexagon is moving in rhythm with the music, and the electronic music further helps you to immerse in the game, to stop thinking and enter that trance state.


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