Waste Paper Basket Game

Just a silly little idea, but a (I think a fun little game). You know the feeling you get when you set up a long throw into the wastepaper basket on the other side of the room - and it goes in? Well, that's the feeling this game should capture.

Starting with a scrunch mechanic (to scrunch the object in your hand to make it more dense and more aerodynamic), you throw the object into a relatively close wastepaper basket. As the basket is place further away, you experiment with different degrees of object 'scrunch' and throwing force.

As you progress, you have to throw off a wall, two walls, moving objects, etc.... Wind resistance, etc could come into play, or not.. The game should be fun really, rather than too challenging ... How about trying to 'skip' an object to be disposed of over a bit of water, and into a large bin on the other side? (ahem)

Bonding atoms gameplay

Over the past few months I've been looking at gameplay and core mechanics. I've been looking at games such as Cloud and flOw and other, smaller games (usually student-produced - the ones that crop up in game competitions, etc), to look at what makes them interesting, novel and accessible.

I also found a sentence .. lost the speaker now.. about learning in games. Something about twitch games helping you to learn how to utilize your finger. It made me think.

Apart from the usual - inherent learning in a videogame - learning a mechanic, overcoming challenges, etc, when one looks at games like, Re-Mission, you learn because of the content, but you are engaged because of the mechanic. I suppose there is also learning due to the mechanic - shooting cancer cells does tend to imply you want to get rid of the little buggers.

Then, taking a look at guitar hero - it's a weird thing ... all these people who are very good at pressing coloured plastic buttons. If there was a bridge,.. to get them to move on from the plastic buttons to making chords .. we'd have thousands of excellent guitarists. I'm not saying that's what the designers should have done. They wanted to make a fun, accesissible game, and thats what they did. I just woner if guitar hero, rock band, etc's popularity is going to mean an increased uptake of musical instruments by people, or whether the virtuosity stays just with the button pushing on a controller.

All that made me think of a bonding atoms mechanism. would there be any point if you had to be a chemist to play the game? Conversely, would it still be 'meaningful' if it was stripped of all it's chemical richness and turned into 'gameplay'? I don't know .... but I've been churning over the idea for the past few months ..... After working out a (relatively) simple bunch of mechanisms that reflect and utilize some key concepts in chemistry - valency, ionic and covalent bonding, period table, etc .. i've been wondering about context, and looking to create one for the chemical mechanisms.

I'll write up my contextual game design proposals, later.. but suffice to say, I have been working towards a metagame that is a natural extension of this mechanic. I haven't found it yet, but i believe there's a really nice, simple, clean and obvious game that could come about from the gameplay.

The Acid Test

The Acid Test - an idea developed from thinking about chemical/alchemical gameplay

The Acid Test is a single player action/puzzle game concerning a young man and his struggle to free his kidnapped wife and child from a professor. Forced to complete alchemical research on himself to guarantee the safety of the ones he loves, he needs to unravel the puzzle of the professor’s work in order to survive and thwart the man’s goal.

The Acid Test is a game with an emotive storyline and varied gameplay that does not require shooting and killing. It has a small cast of well-developed, emotive characters. The action alternates between a first person perspective on ordinary life and a third person perspective of alchemical 3D spaces.

After the hiatus

N othing posted on here since Maya was born in November. But lots happened since the last post, so I'll backtrack in the next feww posts, to bring my blog up to speed with game development so far.