This is what I’ve got up to this point:

The player can move around and trees/water are impassable. The level is loaded from a bmp image.

Here’s the full plan for the game: it’s a Zelda-like stripped down to the bare bones. The player will be able to move around and shoot (“sword beam”) with a limited range.

The basic idea is “explore, get treasure, explore”. There will be dungeons and caves with enemies to be killed and treasure. As the player collects more coins, his attack’s range and power increases.

I’m not sure on what to do with health. I initially thought of doing a hunger bar, slowly depleting and recovered by enemy drops. After I thought of the coins, I thought of making each coin recover a little bit of like, in addition to increasing the player’s power slightly.

Another option is to add separated hp drops, but maybe that would make it too complicated for this theme.

tl;dr, the basic gameplay loop is:

explore->find treasure->get stronger->find more treasure.