Overview:
DragonKeep is a 2D iPhone game which utilises tilt and touch controls. You play as a knight who collects treasure by venturing into a dragon’s lair. As you pick up more and more treasure you’re character slows down. The farther into the cave you go, the higher the chance of finding rare/valuable treasures. Eventually the dragon will show up to chase you out of your cave. When you see him you must run back to the entrance where your magician girlfriend is waiting for you. She takes all of the treasure off of you and sends the dragon back into his lair. If the dragon catches you he sends you flying out the cave, causing you to drop all of your treasure.
Story:
The story takes place in a fantasy land where magic and adventure are abundant. The hero of the story is a somewhat small knight on a mission to win the affection of his cute girlfriend, who happens to be a powerful mage! He has run out of ways to impress her so he promises to bring her the rarest (and shiniest) treasure in the land. Unfortunately after he makes the promise he discovers all the treasure in the kingdom has been stolen by the most fearsome dragons around! So his girlfriend accompanies him to the mouth of the cave, wishes him luck and tells him he better not come back empty handed!
Gameplay:
The player moves left and right along a 2D plane (like a platformer game for example) by tilting the iPhone left and right. They begin each stage at the entrance to the cave standing next to their girlfriend. They must venture off into the cave. The player finds treasure on the ground as he goes along. To pick it up, the player must touch the treasure with their finger and drag into onto your knight’s head. They may throw it off at any time by touching and dragging it off. Along with treasure, the player may find power-ups along the way which might be used as a weapon against the dragon, a distraction, a speed up or anything else.
Treasure and objects stacks on the players head. Only the top object on the pile can be thrown. Thus to use certain items others must be sacrificed if they were picked up in a certain order.
The dragon would appear ‘randomly’ along your way. This would of course have restrictions on it so it could be finetuned to offer an enjoyable experience. (i.e. walk into cave ZOMGDRAGON) It could be based on the number of steps the player takes so as to prevent ‘cheating’ by leaving all the best treasure/power ups for a quick return trip.
When the dragon appears he will chase you back the way you came. The player must run or they will die. Power ups may be used to spice things up. When (or if) you make it back to the cave entrance, your girlfriend takes all the treasure off of you and awards you a rank based on how much shiny you brought her. Pray you didn’t disappoint her.
Inspiration:
I actually found my inspiration for this game somewhere odd. In Team Fortress 2 when you play as demoman you can ‘collect’ the heads of your foes by killing them with a sword. For each head you collect you gain a health boost and a faster moving speed. This has a cumulative effect, so the more heads you collect the stronger/faster you become. However, dying causes you to lose all the heads you’ve accumulated. For me this generates a huge rush of excitement as the thrill of becoming unstoppable grows with each head. However, an unexpected outcome is that although stronger than usual, the player tends to play more carefully than they would without the heads. The desire to ‘gamble’ comes into play.
Thinking about this made me realise many other games make use of this mechanic. An indie game called ‘Recettear’ I played recently had a dungeon crawling aspect, in which you collect increasingly rare items as you descend. You face stronger enemies too and dying of course costs you all of your items. Do I play on and hopefully find even more shiny? Or retreat to my base and keep what I have found?
Aside from this mechanic, I am inspired by bright and colourful games like those by Nintendo. Nintendo also is excellent at making item ‘collecting’ very satisfying with addictive sound effects and visuals.
I am also inspired by the ridiculous amount of money these games earn on the iPhone store. ‘Cut the Rope’, ‘Fruit Ninja’, ‘Angry Birds’ all feature a bright energetic aesthetic which has a mass appeal.
Important points:
- Making rewards ‘rewarding’
- Getting the randomness right
- Replay ability
- Extra mechanics to prevent oversimplification
- Implement someway to pass the dragon so you can be chased further into the cave
- The game doesn’t ‘need’ to be on the iPhone particularly. I just thought it was fitting. It would work just as well on anything else really.
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sounds great! love the idea on the Bright and Colourful artstyle, when you brought up " dragging objects onto their heads" i thought maybe a Big Head would be useful, like a Wobble head or whatever, so that the player can drag it on and off easily :)
ReplyDeleteregardless, Nice idea and you've thought it through very well :)
Logan
Heheh thanks. It would be fun to have some kind of 'balance' aspect where you tilt the iphone to keep the pile of treasure steady or something. :P
ReplyDeleteWow that's a lot of writing for that one! Good to see the huge amount of effort : )
ReplyDeleteI won't say much cos we'll be mulling it over tomorrow anyway, but I'll just say that your inspiration explanation led me to think on Pikmin; I think it performs that risk and reward mechanic beautifully.
I don't know if you've played it, probably have : P. But yeah, choosing whether or not to go after that last bit of treasure and save time or to play it safe and get back to your ship before nightfall, that's what I was thinking of. We could find ways to incorporate that use of tactic in Dragonkeep.
I'm thinking the game is a tad simple though, we could whip this up pretty quick I reckon. We could knock it up another notch with some 3D and more exploration and movement mechanics : D. What can I say? I'm an adventure man : P.
Talk to you tomorrow anyway ; )
P.S. I'm sorry, have been using my laptop at home this past week and it's automatically logged me out of Steam. I couldn't be bothered logging in again : P. I'll check it now though.
ReplyDelete