lit the fire
So the idea of making a game about trapped miners’ revenge was a flash during my shower time. I really like the game Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town (2003) on Game Boy. It was my memory of boring and hot as hell summer vacation. I can still remember lots of details and the season flow inside the game.
One of the core mechanism of the game is to go mining on 2 different mines in order to obtaion different coal and materials to forge powerful tools. Besides, there’s events and precious item hidden in different floor of these mines. To get all floor’s different item, player have to manage their energy and stemina during throughout mining. According to the Havest Moon Wiki,
If you are having troubles finding the jewel and are using a lot of stamina, revert back to your old save. That way, you save yourself the energy, and the floor will be reloaded when you load up your save
https://harvestmoon.fandom.com/wiki/Kappa_Jewels_(FoMT), Line 10
Basically, once you decided to collect certain item, Save and Load system becomes critical due to limited energy. And Lets go back to my shower time. I thought an idea that what will happen if each save you made can be a independent world and have its own main character and eco system. And they are all deprived of the capability of Save and Load.
that’s the rough idea of Trapped: the game, and I am extremely uncertainly about its future. But after finishing my shower, I ran out to write down all my thoughts.
A helping hand and prototyping
About assets and art style of the game, I can only say that my drawing will have 99% chance to ruin the story. and thank god my course mate Ziqi (Leefer) Wang is finding a working partner to finish the assignment. After our first discussion, the 2 person group formed up. Knowing that she likes mining game and pixel arts, I am more than grateful.
This Trello page https://trello.com/b/gxp1Zpeb/trapped-the-game will record our thoughts and meeting discussion. For now we’ve had 2 meetings about the plots and character design. And in this assignment, Leefer will focus more on enviornmental storytelling and art design, and I will be the programmer and writer. Also I wil try to dig out every mechanic about Save&Load, and see which one suit the best.
For fast prototyping, we decided to use free assets to test gameplay and other possible solutions. Gamemaker’s Toolkit had one video about a theme “Game will tell you how to design” and it inspired me a lot. Next thing I would do is to develop different version of the game and playtest it.