It’s almost Saturday midnight here in New Zealand.
The only other thing I accomplished today apart from the Warmup submission was adding in some magic stairs in my little First Person scene. When you got close to it the stairs would magically come up. Cool stuff. Used my interaction system so it was really easy to implement. Using Unity helps as well. God bless Unity.
I’ll have all of Sunday to work on this, so the bulk of the game will have to get done on Sunday. Got work on Monday, after all. The jam ends on Monday at 3PM, so I might be able to squeeze a tiny extra bit at work during my lunch break, or cheekily and stealthily during work hours.
Still haven’t nailed a solid idea yet to do with You Only Get One. Random ideas that came to mind:
You only get
One Companion cube. Carry it and take it with you throughout the game. You only get one, and you need it.
One Light source. A lighter or candle. You only get one, so you need to make sure you keep it lit. Don’t let water or wind put the light out.
One Life. Quite an obvious one, but hey.
One Chance. Which is like getting 2 lives, basically. You’re allowed to die once, and you get one chance to try again. This is more interesting than one life, but not by much. It has potential to be *very* interesting in my opinion, but I don’t think I’ll be able to explore it enough in the time.
One hint. Imagine an Oracle who is able to answer only one of your questions (more of an adventure game / dialog tree thing) or provide you only one hint. Don’t think I could stretch this enough to make it all that interesting, and it’s far less of a game mechanic than I’d like anyway.
Breaking it down to its essence, You Only Get One boils down to you having a selection of things – of which in the usual case you might be able to claim all of them – and may only pick *one*. That, or, instead of having multiples of a single thing, instead you’re restricted to having only one.
Examples of case 1: one weapon (pick the sword, or the gun), one companion (pick the warrior, or the mage), one vehicle (bike, or car?), etc.
Examples of case 2: one bullet, one hit point, one life, etc.
To me, case 2 seems to be more interesting. Case 1 presents you with a choice. But if you think about it, games already do this all the time. Many RPGs have you select only a single reward from a completed quest, for example. In Diablo 3 you can only have one companion at one time, and you have to select one class that your character is (he can’t be a mage AND a warrior).
Case 2 however, presents you with a *catch*. The *catch* is you only get *one* life. Or, the catch is, your gun only has *one* bullet in the clip. These are fairly standard and somewhat unoriginal ideas, but I think they’re at the very least interesting, and in the right direction. It’s interesting that you only get one life because it means you would have to play VERY carefully. Same with the bullet – you’ll have to wait for the most opportune moment to use it. I think an interesting game mechanic or gameplay experience will come as a direct result of such a *catch*.
Anyway, I’m a big believer in sleep, even during a 48 hour jam (*especially* during a 48 hour jam), so I’ll be tackling the rest of the project tomorrow. I’ll just be continuing my work on the basic first person exploration puzzle game, hoping to eventually find a cool idea that suits the theme and fit it in there.
Goodnight!
Will be for the next time
