08 July 2012
Chased by Ghosts
I wrote the prototype of a game, where you play as a little dot being chased by a light-generating ghost. That's pretty much it, and it's kind of annoying, because it was fun trying to write a real-time light rendering thing for my game, even if the game is really simple and probably almost childs play for somebody who writes code professionally.
I'm trying to figure out what exactly I want to do with the game, which is annoying because it's not really a mechanic that lends itself to strong gameplay options. What you have is your light source chasing you down. When it touches you, you die.
Naturally, this lends itself poorly to "race as fast as you can" sorts of games, and strongly towards both memorization challenges and manual dexterity challenges. The memorization is pretty poor gameplay, in general, since any game that can be completely bypassed by a piece of paper without any other gameplay elements that might add randomness or fun (like old dungeon crawling games, for example) is only just barely a game. And trying to add challenges that require quick moves in a game where information is necessarily limited isn't easy, either.
I'll probably just sit on it for a while. I wanted to share, because game prototyping is fun!
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I can see the potential. Two ideas I think would work well is if it was a sort of puzzle room game, like Adventures of Lolo or Solomon's Key and the like. And I think if there were a number of ghosts of assorted colors, and a colored block you must get that certain ghost to cross. That's a pretty simple mechanic you can build on for layers of complexity. Also, I can see the benefit of maybe a mechanic like the Boos in Mario games, so you can get a breather and take a look around for a second. And also maybe a Portal gun like device. I'd play the crap out of that.
ReplyDeleteSo it's Pacman but you can only see the part of the board illuminated by the ghosts? Could work. You're running down a hallway that gets darker as you get farther from the ghost, then suddenly the intersection ahead of you starts to get lighter...
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