Dead end
– Sometimes you have to kill your babies. No real ones of course but ideas and concepts that don’t work. Here the sad story about a concept we had to kill.
As written in part 3, we collected a lot of ideas and tried to form a game out of this, but we made the mistake to think that a bunch of good game play ideas will work for a concept. The collection of ideas were added up together to a story driven cooperative puzzle platformer with adventure like elements. Can you notice something wrong already? Check again with more detail:
The game idea included:
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Electro magnetic manipulation (this includes a bit more than just magnetism).
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Platformer with puzzles.
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A storyline concerning recent activities.
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Characters made out of electric parts.
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2 players enhancing/helping each other.
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Communication with NPC through electromagnetic bursts.
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Steam punk / tech style (like Machinarium, but different).
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Storyline based loosely on epic concept of the heroes journey.
At the end we had a nice game idea with a bit of everything but maybe therefore generic and without fun.
* Rebirth *
We threw out everything and started new.
Reviewing the old pitches in search for something good, we noticed something in the “Bomb and Fuse” idea: there was a big artefact in the background, a big robot. And then we asked why not the robot is the stage instead of just a decorative goal? And why not destroy the world instead of save it? Why not making the game a bit faster and with more action?
We were excited with this new idea but we were still missing a higher concept like the one we had in “Tales of Archy”.
But this is long enough! Next post we’ll talk about that.
