Skip to main content

2D Side Scroller : Gameplay Verbs


A man was eaten by a verb. That's what happened. Verb ate'im.



When coming up with ideas for my game I tried to think of all the actions a player could take as different verbs. I would then construct sentences using those verbs to represent the puzzles of each stage. For example:

The player first Climbs up the platform, then Pushes the box onto the spikes. The player then Falls from the platform onto the box then Jumps to the Checkpoint.

This clearly shows the different actions the player will take in the puzzle and allows me to see what each puzzle idea is actually asking the player to do and how much in between checkpoints. if the sentences get too long then I know I need to break them up with a checkpoint. or if they get too repetitive I know I will need to vary up or rearrange the challenges. 

List of verbs in my game

Jump

Run

Crouch

Push

Reset

Dodge

Climb

Fall

To be clear each verb doesn't necessarily correspond to a specific mechanic. The feeling a player gets when asked to jump from one platform to another across a gap is different from when the player jumps up and set of platforms to get to a higher place. This system of verbs better represents gameplay I feel than simply listing mechanics and the context in which the mechanic is used is equally important to its use in the first place. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2D Side Scroller : The Final Idea

When the rubber meets the road. The Panda here represents  Covid-19 During the course of recent events, it became clear to me that my time was somewhat limited in this project. As a result, I have elected to go with my first idea, the Dung beetle puzzle game. This should provide me with a decent opportunity to stretch myself in the implementation and iteration of mechanically without requiring nearly as much in terms of asset creation which for this project at least isn't one of the marking criteria anyway.  The Dung Beetle Puzzle Game is changing slightly to just a puzzle game but keeping the core idea of pushing a large ball around as its main mechanic. So the player characters job is to get the ball to its goal and then make their way to the exit of the stage. This gives me a solid and simple foundation to build some hopefully cool puzzles off of without bogging me down in extra systems, which if you refer to my previous ideas was rampant. Even when stating that I have eyes...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Barbican

Enemy at the Gate The Barbican estate in London features a lot of the style of architecture that I wanted to emulate in the art and design project, so for this project, I'm going to try to create my own barbican estate using the real one as the palette. To do this I'm going to create concept art using the barbican as part of a reference sandwich to create unique architecture that should both be evocative of contemporary London, retrofuturist and contain elements meant to subtly guide the player through the area to their goal.
Post a Comment
Read more

Affine texture mapping : Subdivide Mesh

Af fine map indeed Another bug I  encountered in my previous project was when using the PSX shader on large surfaces the warping became severe which was disorientating while playing. This is because the affine mapping that the shader does to emulate the affine mapping the PS1 did, approximates the positions of vertices in screen space meaning that if the vertex in question is far off-screen the approximation becomes more inaccurate meaning that if you subdivide the meshes into smaller triangles the effect is drastically diminished.
Post a Comment
Read more