More ideas + sketches/storyboard for game

 16/10/23

When on the bus I remembered a game mechanic from the Game "MySims" which I have for the Wii

Image from Wii Game: A MySims Guide - Game Yum

The mechanic in question involved a metal detector (seen in the images), in certain areas this would appear and there would be coloured circles around it indicating how close you are to the treasure, there were also vibrations in the Wii remote. When you think you are at the treasure you use your shovel to dig. Sadly I couldn't find a video of this to show for the example.

Image from MySims - wii - Walkthrough and Guide - Page 5 - GameSpy

Therefore I thought maybe instead of having numbers like in Minesweeper I could have a different type of indicator.

I drew a sketch of how this might look 

Only the square the character is on will show a colour, which indicates how far the character is from a trap or treasure. The player has to use clues gained from quests to determine what the indicators are leading to. In this example, the clue is "To find the treasure you must look to the east of the crystals." If you step on the trap, you will enter a chase mini-game with the monster (initially this would be game over, but I thought I could incorporate the chase element I thought of). 

The indicators from the clues would be objects that the player cannot walk on and therefore they also serve as obstacles. As the game progresses there will be more objects, including some to mislead the player if they do not have the clue, there will also be more traps and maybe more treasures per level increasing the risk. 

I also drew a storyboard of the game: 

This was really helpful because even though I freestyled some elements (like the background of the puzzle) it gave me a good idea of the sort of structure of how the game will look. 

The advice I got from the tutorial I had was to start working on modelling the characters and to create a digital mock-up of the puzzle.