Week 2: In Which an Idea Takes it's First Steps

This week our group worked more on refining our idea as a whole, laying out level designs and various mechanics we’d have to implement to allow our world rotations to work. Everyone in our group worked on one or more level designs over the weekend, some focused on puzzle design, while other’s focused merely on mechanics. I chose to work on designing a level that could be playable at all of our main rotations. What I created involved the level decaying and falling to pieces while the world moved, although it could require more dynamic movement then we may be able to implement (especially a level flow that melted platforms in half). We also decided on a more concrete scale of our levels, giving a basic size to each room being 20 units by 20 units where one unit represents the height of the player character. This was so that each level could connect to the other nicely and fit well on a grid. In addition to this standard size for each room we agreed that if someone wanted to create something larger to just take the space of two or more rooms to keep our nice grid-like structure.

20 seconds in Photoshop, because I don't have a scanner,
and someone wanted lots of images.

Week 1 (again): In Which an Idea is Born and a Blog is Reused; Also Art!

Another year has started and so has our next game (tentatively title PIVOTal). Over the past week we have brainstormed many, many ideas narrowing it down and refining it to something achievable yet still challenging. We even managed to pick a perfect theme to go with our game (I’ll let that be a surprise, but I’m sure someone else must have posted it anyway).

We decided to make our game in a Metroidvania style, somewhat similar to Shadow Complex. As is common within a Metroidvania style game we have agreed upon trying (and hopefully succeeding) to make a huge game world, inside a factory, with many power ups and collectables. The main action of our game will be dedicated to solving puzzles with occasional combat. In order to make our game more unique we added the element of rotation. During the players time in the factory they will come across rooms that allow them to rotate the entire world (as if on a pivot, like our title; clever, I know). This rotation opens up new paths for the player to advance as well as alters existing paths to create new puzzles in order to return from whence they came.