Climbing the Mountain

[randyo]

Hey everyone!

I'm working on a new game, and I dunno if this is the way to go about it or not, but I'm going to be posting works in progress and hopefully you enjoy what I'm up to.

There's a part of me that worries about WIP ruining the magic of what I'm trying to create, showing you all the turning gears, but it's a risk I'm willing to try.

So, the base idea I'm working from is a one-button game where you try to ascend a mountain to reach the monastery at the top. It's a new challenge for me as it's going to be a randomly generated game. The goal is to choose the best paths to walk/climb such that you have the energy to reach all the way to the top.

If you haven't played my previous game, Dead End HD, well like that, I want this to be tough, hopefully forcing you to get better and smarter. But unlike Dead End, I want it to have more story content, more a feeling of a meaningful world.

So that's that, and to start off, here are some various images, firstly of some style sketches, and then some pictures of the path generation [very] in progress (the second one is totally broken, but looks awesome!).

Cheers, folks!

[mr.Ugly]

reminds me of an free climbing game idea i had in the early ipad days.. where you control your arms separately with some sort of dual stick controls to strategically reach ledges.. and look around for them using tils to move your head ..

anyway.. the idea is interesting.. lets see how it turn out


good luck

[randyo]

Random rambling musings on my random game! (These days I'm mostly making art for my friend's PC puzzle-platformer: http://indiestatik.com/2013/01/25/es...hots-and-info/ )

I have been having both a fun and excruciating time designing this game. It's about choosing the paths you take up a mountainside, do you stay on the main path and rest at villages that fully regenerate you, or do you venture off the main path, bypassing villages but getting a more powerful "energy" that's more rare.

By making this game about planning rather than doing (even though you are doing the movement as well), the challenge is generating a fun challenge about planning decisions. Decision-making is about awareness or lack thereof?

Should the game be about immediate challenges or should it be about long-term decisions? I want both. In Dead End it was always about surviving moment-to-moment, which I like, and that gets you a bit further in the long term. Dead End has increasingly fewer moments of safety. You have to play smart over and over until you get a respite.

Hmm, writing this out is useful.

The question is how explicitly do I present the correct path? Perhaps I've been so set on having right and wrong be more vague in the game that I'm missing the joy of reactionary planning.

I want this game to be about skill. Challenging yourself, taking risks. But a risk means you don't know how it will turn out... I don't want it chance-driven. Gah, it's amazing how hard it is to design something seemingly so simple! Hopefully I will find an answer to this design challenge.

[randyo]

Update #2: Monk Ascending

Thank you guys! Whether you realize it or not, my decision to post on here last week was a god-send in helping me figure out design changes to my game.

I said that I couldn't tell if there was too much randomness to gameplay. Welp, typing it all out made me realize that the cool twisting paths you see in my previous post are totally unnecessary.

By building gameplay around random twisting paths I made the gameplay itself random and twisting rather than focused and understandable. There are no more paths that meander between diagonal and vertical and back to diagonal. The "branches" are straight vertical paths and the main path is only made of diagonals. Make as much of the game predictable as possible, and remove the randomness where possible.

I'm guessing it doesn't seem like much has changed in the last few images posted, but believe you me, the game's design is starting to feel crisp.

I may even add some initial rough art soon! Well, once I get the control scheme working more smoothly. Cheers!