The Game Plan!
Akake on 2008/09/07 10:19
of The Laughing Fox
— edited on 2008/09/07 10:41
I woke up really early today (About 3:00 AM where I am), and got some ideas down. Now, I've had a few ideas for this theme, but most are either beyond my abilities (Or at least beyond the point where I have confidence in my abilities), or they lend themselves best to arcade-style games, which I wanted to avoid in this challenge. Some, like mouse wrangling, could go either way, others would involve a wee bit TOO much geometry, such as the "Bionic Commando-style" idea.
I have a plan, though.
Most of the more fun concepts I came up with involved lots of silly made-up words (Like "Hoozpicket" or "Frobnitz"), and I chose one of those ideas.
I do not have any art yet, as I've been working on my collision detection. I plan to use pygame.Rect for game entities, and a polygon-based collision system for the playing field.
This will work by checking whether any of the lines in the polygon pass through the entities' collision rectangles, which will be checked by checking whether the point on the line that falls on the horizontal center of the rectangle is inside of the rectangle.
Work thus far has been promising, and by that, I mean that I have been able to find the point on a line for a given X or Y coordinate.
It may be a little early to judge, but I think I have severely underestimated my proficiency with geometry.I'll have some concept art up as soon as I have my collision system done. ;)
The game centers around a race of people known as the Freebnots. They are a tiny people who build their cities out of string and little bits of wood. The Freebnots stand about six inches in height, and tend to have auburn or brown hair, with deep blue or brown eyes. They dress in clothes made of bits of material they lift from "The Giants" (IE:Humans ;)), with the most wealthy among them dressing in faux fur. They dwell in cities high up in the trees, in buildings made up of bits of wood held together with string in an elaborate system of knots. They speak in English, but use their own sorts of names instead of human ones. (IE:They have silly names like Nimbil, Renina, and Yillider)
The game's protagonist is a young Freebnot woman named Friba. She is a treasure hunter, and the game is about her search for a great treasure:The Crystal Pearl. This "treasure" is, in fact, an opalescent glass marble, but these people are six inches tall and live in trees. To them, it's is a priceless jewel. ;)
While I'm giving physical descriptions, Friba is a bit short for a Freebnot (IE:About 5 and 3/4 inches), and wears a faux fur gown. She has long, thick auburn hair and brown eyes.
She is very tough, and can fight most enemies hand-to-hand. She also carries string, and can use it to tie up enemies and form bridges across gaps. She can also jump impressively.
The levels will be made up of various wood-and-string platforms with string bridges as well. The enemies will mostly be things like squirrels, other Freebnots, and some other whimsical sorts of creatures I haven't thought of yet.
There. Got it all down. :P
And the theme DOES factor in in more than the fact that string is involved, in that the player has limited numbers of piece of string of different lengths. This makes the length important, as the player must use the correct length. :P
Yay for four-in-the-morning ideas! XD
I wish everyone the best of luck! ^_^