Design Idea Wk 6: Hardware driven game

Re: Design Idea Wk 6: Hardware driven game

My idea is for a physics-based game where the main character is a magician who has to balance several objects into a tower. The point of using a magician is that the character can levitate the objects to put them in place, and the loss of touch sensation wouldn’t impact the player’s immersion into the game.

The levitation process would involve intricate finger movements, though I haven’t designed a way to make those intuitive to learn and at the same time present a meaningful challege to the player.

Reflection Wk 6: Player-centred design

Re: Reflection Wk 6: Player-centred design

I’ll take a parallel to film theory for this one. While catering to a large audience might seem like common sense, there is a school of thought that says that film can work on a much smaller but very powerful scale. One such example can be made from the films of Jean Rouch. While his films can look sub-par for the common viewer, Rouch believed that film could bring positive change to those involved. In his film Human Pyramid (1961), for example, Rouch employed a group of mixed race students from the Ivory Coast to tell a story about racism in society. While the film doesn’t make any effort on production values, the students involved in it actually overcame their prejudices and became close after the film. The film worked as a kind of social therapy, as was intended by Rouch.

The same could apply to games, in my opinion. Player-centred design makes a lot of sense if you want to reach a big audience, but games could also work the same way as Rouch’s films, even if only at a individual level. This seems to be the case with Passage. Although I’m not familiar with the designer’s decisions for the game, it seems to be a very personal project that he happened to share on the net.

Design Idea wk5: Mechanic driven

Re: Design Idea wk5: Mechanic driven

My idea is a puzzle where players have to control jets of water (like those synchronized water fountains). On a 2D, side-view field, the goal is to program the jets streams in such a way that when played out, the streams never collide.

The field is composed of holes at the bottom of the screen. Each hole can shoot or receive a stream, the player chooses at programming time.

In order to create a challenge, the requirements for a successful solution would gradually be made more complex, e.g. each move needs at least 2 streams being shot at the same time and at opposite directions: each hole can only be used for a pre-defined numbner of times; and so on.

Since the player can only find out the result once the programming part is done, the game would challenge his or her memory as the levels get more complex.