Ship v Maze from Cosmic Droplet is a test of your reflexes inspired by Super Hexagon

Ship v Maze, from solo developer Cosmic Droplet, is out on Steam today. The game is an addictive test of skill that challenges you to navigate a randomly arranged maze in a ship that’s always moving, faster and faster. All you can do is turn left or right. You’ll crash. A lot. But it’s more of a meditative than a frustrating experience, and you’ll be compelled to keep trying.

I interviewed Frederic Vanmol, the developer behind the game, to learn more about his design process and get insight into how he made the game. I’ve included his responses in full below, with only minor edits for clarity.

You can get the game now on Steam. A demo is also available.

Sam Kahn, for The Geekly Grind (GG): Could you introduce yourself? Tell us who you are, your company, and what you do. How did you get into game development?

Frederic Vanmol, Cosmic Droplet (CD): I’m Frederic Vanmol, from Belgium. I got into programming over 30 years ago because I wanted to make games, but I never got anywhere because I tried to make a really big game with very little experience. This did, however, eventually get me into working on FL Studio (FruityLoops at the time), and I’ve been doing that for the past 26 years. Cosmic Droplet is more a name than a company as it’s just me. I figured it would make it all seem more real than it actually is.

GG: Can you describe Ship v Maze? What do you want players to experience with the game? What's the core emotion or feeling you're chasing?

CD: Ship v Maze is a straightforward game of skill and reflexes. Fly your ship, avoid obstacles, and survive for as long as you can. I’d like players to feel both frustrated when they crash and happy when they beat their own high score or that of a friend. Stress builds up as you play, but then you reach a point that you hadn’t before, and it was all worth it.

GG: What games inspired you? What brought you to this specific concept? Were there any non-game influences?

CD: The main inspiration was Super Hexagon. I loved playing that, trying to do better than my friends. I wanted to make a game that felt like that for a very long time. While trying to visualize the look of the player character for another game, I thought of the shape of the ship with the three lines, and I imagined it flying through a maze. The concept grew from that.

GG: What was the design and iteration process like for the game? The game has a very simple but effective core loop, with gameplay that doesn’t have too many frills. I find that my instinct in projects is always “add more.” How did you maintain the discipline to keep things simple?

CD: I don’t know if there was much of a process. I tend to think of the simplest thing I can do next and then try that until it works (or it’s discarded). In the meantime, I write down any ideas that come up until I can try those out.

I learned over the course of my career that trying to do everything at once is the best way to never finish anything. I still have the tendency to try to do that, but I usually also recognize it and am not afraid to throw out what I’ve done if it just keeps dragging on. It did help that I wanted to make something with the feel of Super Hexagon, the goal was always to make something that didn’t have too many features. That made it easier to discard the additions everyone kept suggesting.

GG: What choices did you make to reinforce the addictive nature of the game, to make players want to keep trying instead of wanting to throw their controllers through their screens? I always felt like I could do just a little better.

CD: I knew it had to be as easy as possible to restart when you crash. Any friction there would give players a chance to stop playing. I also wanted to challenge the player to do better. The main crash speech, “the maze wins,” dares you to do better. The somewhat annoying robot voice probably also helps with this. It was created with a 25-year-old speech synth in FL Studio, and initially, it was just a placeholder until I found time to properly record the speech. During development, it quickly became part of the feel of the game, an invisible antagonist, so I decided to keep it.

GG: The game has this almost meditative quality despite being quite challenging. Was that tension between calm and intensity intentional? How do you design for that kind of contradictory feeling?

CD: First, I think this is just a characteristic of this type of game. I feel the same about Super Hexagon; it challenged me but also helped to relax. I did reinforce this a bit, however. Some of the segments are intentionally easy, with nothing to do but fly straight, for example. This relaxes, though it can also create a false sense of security and lead to crashes when you suddenly get to a more difficult segment.

The music plays a large part in this as well. When I heard Oxygene by Jean-Michel Jarre, I knew what type of music I wanted, and then my friend Michiel created songs that encapsulated both the relaxing and the challenging aspects.

GG: How long have you been working on this? For a minimalist game, what took the most time to get right?

CD: I started working on it in late August, so it’s been about 7 months of evenings, weekends and vacations spent looking at a screen. I think I spent the most time implementing the visuals of the obstacles. I knew from the start what they should look like, but I didn’t know initially how to implement that. At first, I used shaders to draw the patterns, but I had never used those before, so it was a lot of trial and error. The menu also took a lot of time, as I was never really happy with what I had.

GG: Tell me about the design of the mazes. How do you balance the order of the random segments? What led to the decision to start the player and maze in a random orientation?

CD: Balancing is mostly trial and error. I think of something and then try it out over and over until it feels right. Initially, the ship would always start flying to the right, as that felt most natural to me, and it’s what I did in the first prototype. Most players didn’t like this, as the controls feel more natural flying up, so I had to change it. In the end, I made it random because it adds some difficulty to the game, and because I didn’t completely want to give up starting to the right.

GG: What was behind the decision to have a fixed turning speed and radius? While playing, I felt like I desperately wanted analog control for variable turning. Did you prototype other approaches?

CD: The fixed turning speed is taken from Super Hexagon, so it’s what I started out with. It’s also the best way to make the game playable with the keyboard, which was my initial goal. I didn’t spend all that much time experimenting with having the player control the turning speed, just with the exact ratio to the flying speed, and turning faster the longer you hold the button. The last change I made was snapping to the four main directions to be able to fly straight more easily, as a result of player feedback.

GG: How did you balance difficulty? How much impact did input from players have on it?

CD: It was a combination of my own experiences playing the game as it evolved and feedback from my friends for the initial prototypes. Because of the geometrical shapes and the fixed flying and turning speeds, balancing is probably a bit easier than for other games. For example, the width of the lanes in segments was more variable at first, but there’s a minimum dictated by the turning radius. So as long as I stick with that, the difficulty is also more or less the same.

In case you missed the link earlier, Ship v Maze is available now on Steam.