So I'm making a game, and decided to keep a journal of my progress. Let's say weekly-ish. I've already been working on it for about three weeks, so this first post will cover the core ideas, the next post will cover everything I've got so far, and subsequent posts will be plain log entries.
This is actually a restart of a project I worked on for a few months last year. I ended up losing the source, and now I've started over on it with a few new ideas.
The gimmick of the game is the player can teleport without limit. Now how do you make that fun? The typical method to make a game fun is challenge. Perhaps it also has some intrinsic fun because it's so unique and powerful. But let's assume we want it to be challenging and go from there.
I've chosen to make it 2D, because mice are 2D and they're a great controller for quickly selecting a specific spot. (This also makes the DS and the Wii good choices for a platform, but it's easier to develop for PC if you're broke.) I've also chosen to make it a platformer instead of top-down or isometric to have vertical travel be more important. If we make teleporting preserve your velocity, you can teleport to midair spots but you'll fall, potentially reaching a fatal collision speed. This limits teleporting in a natural way; it's easier to move around horizontally than vertically and you have to worry more and finding spots to stand on.
Let's talk about other limits. Typical ways to limit teleporting are range and recovery time. There are many examples of a very short range teleport (a 'blink'), on the order of a few meters. And almost universally you're limited to a certain number of teleports, or teleport-per-unit-of-time. City of Heroes, for example, has a very long startup time. When you click to teleport, it takes a few seconds of your character posing before you actually teleport, and then you can't move for a few moments afterward. This makes it worthless in any fast paced situation, relegating it to travel over long distances. Because it is very long range, it's the best travel option. You can get across any zone in the game in just a few hops with an upgraded teleport.
But what if we want really fast teleporting? This is probably extremely powerful. Even if you limit the range, the character can move around large distances very quickly, if there are places to stand along the way. The traditional platformer goal of, "get to the end of this obstacle course," becomes trivial. Is there some other goal that remains challenging?
What are some other goals in video games besides "get to the end of this area"? A few generalized things come to mind: Defeat opponent(s), collect things. Defeating opponents could be a goal, or *avoiding* defeat by them could be the goal, while you work on other goals (survive a certain amount of time, collect things.)
With these other goals in mind, it's still possible to make "get to this spot" a goal, you just have to keep in mind that typical platformer level design becomes very easy with a teleport. A teleporter is going to be more challenged by things with lots of vertical travel, dangerous drops, and maybe mazes and jumps that only become safe by teleport part of the way.
Anyway, here's what's I've got so far: You have large, intricate levels. Scattered around the levels are objectives, and enemies. It's possible to avoid enemies, and it's very difficult to actually fight them (but your teleport gives you an advantage). You have to go around the level and collect things (possibly NPCs), and getting around the level will switch between slowly sneaking around when guards are present, or running, jumping and performing acrobatics that Feel Good when there is no danger. So the levels will have lots of fun, crisscrossing paths to move around the level easily once you've figured out where to go. Additionally it will have situations and puzzles which push the player's understanding of and skill with the teleport.
So there are a couple different aspects: Stealth, parkour, combat, exploration and how teleporting affects all of them.
Time to build an engine! I've prototyped this game before, about a year ago, and got a pretty good idea of how I want the controls and physics to feel, but I lost that source, so I'm starting over now with a better idea of what I want it to do. Next post: Basics of the engine, and line of sight.
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