First diary entry: brainstorming

Cosmologicon on 2009/05/21 03:51 of Cosmologicon

It'll be some time before I have anything to show. So far I've just got a tray icon, and something that checks for the pygame version. (I thought about somehow getting the game to work in older pygame versions, but I use LayeredUpdate extensively, so I'd pretty much have to re-implement it. So I'm requiring pygame 1.8.0.) Mostly I've been brainstorming game mechanics.

My main plan is to have 15-20 levels (the PyWeek version has 5). No two levels should be exactly alike: each one should have some new or unique aspect, a unit or a hazard or something else. If each level lasts 3-4 minutes, that's an hour of gameplay, and hopefully it'll stay interesting for that long.

cyhawk suggested that rotation affect gameplay. This is a great idea, and some of the mechanics I thought of have to do with that. For instance, you'll have a couple seconds' warning of where lightning will strike, so you can avoid it to a certain extent by rotating out of the way.

I also want to incorporate placement as much as possible. It should matter not only how many structures you have, but where they are with respect to each other. I've got some ideas for how to make this happen, but nothing yet that will offer a rich strategy, where you have to make tradeoffs. Still working on it.

I realized I haven't played many video games lately. I'll have to find some strategy games to play that I can steal ideas from.