POST 1: Wreckless Rally: Brainstorming and merging two genres
Guidelines we follow, tips for you!
Some things to keep in mind that has helped us greatly in our ludum entries. Players will only have a minute or two to rate your game, so time your game! You are targeting a broad audience, and you more than likely won’t have enough time to satisfy hard core fans of a genre, so keep the game simplistic and intuitive. Ideally it has to have some replayability. Prototype your core mechanics asap!
Brainstorming and merging two genres
Just submitting to the theme can make brainstorming a lot of fun. Are we going to make an FPS mixed with Murder Mystery where you were the suspect? A stock broker RTS? A poetry brawler? The possibilities!
We settled on taking a very mechanically juicy core loop jewel matching game like bejeweled with something completely opposite: a top down cart racing game.
Whiteboarding a core loop
The player’s experience has to be fun and intuitive. Infusing one genre with the flavors of the other and boiling it down seemed like the best way to achieve that; just stacking all mechanics would make it too hard to understand and loads of work to code.
After torturing my girlfriend for her jewel game knowledge and google-fu ing this infographic and exchaustive blog post by Jonathan Bailey we got a good grasp of the meaty bits:
The goal of the game is to score points by making easy-to-hard matches. The track is the board. The cars are the pieces. Player controls the board indirectly, with his tow truck.
Easy enough. But how will we make the player control the pieces exactly?
Next up: Prototyping Smototyping!