Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Now This is What I Am Talking About!

For the longest time I had struggled trying to find out what "Aldea Lenta" was going to do in terms of gameplay elements. This uncertainty made me waver back and forth between making the game action oriented and making the game puzzle oriented. And since I did not have confidence in either one of these approaches, I was planning on meshing them into a messy "adventure" design, similar to the mix of these two found in the Zelda series (which is far less messy and better planned than what I was considering). This mesh led to me only coming up with uninspired, boring gameplay elements like door switches and deadly crushers that were not interesting to interact with and had absolutely nothing to do with the core rail mechanic the game was built upon.

But now this has changed!

Looking to combine both the story and context of the game with the gameplay, I decided to look at the common themes the two can share. And then it came to me; reconstruction! To not divulge plot details, I will just say that this theme is vital to the entirety of the game's story crap. This basically means that the route I am taking with "Aldea Lenta" is the puzzler one. There will not be much action, especially combat, which makes sense considering that the location of the main character does not hold any hostile entities (except naive crushers of course. I might still include them in the game as some joke).

So what kind of puzzles will players be encountering in "Aldea Lenta?" Well, most of the puzzles revolve around rebuilding broken structures found within Shipyard 31. Walls, computer circuits, databases, and rails are among the objects that will be rebuilt and re-engineered throughout the game. This is done using the mouse, with the player's character manipulating these pieces remotely via a zero-point energy interfacing tool. I will leave these thoughts with an image showing an example of a very simple puzzle that could be found in the game. This one is sliding block puzzle were the player needs to rearrange the pieces so that they can have a path forward.

No comments:

Post a Comment