Today is an official slacker day, plus I have a Superbowl party to go to so I'm only spending a couple of hours today to start the overall design of my February project.
The concept is similar to Puzzle Quest but instead of a match 3 game I'm going to try a game where you match the corners of boxes, where each box has up to 4 different corner types.
The reason I'm going to try a different mechanic is that the market is flooded with match 3 type games and I'm looking for something with similar properties but a bit less mindless. I understand the value of a mindless distraction but I'm hoping my solution will raise the bar a tiny notch but still qualify as a very low cognitive load while playing.
While the idea is to have a large game with multiple characters, online play, character persistence and in game purchases this months effort is focused on the actual match game. I'm simply trying to get blocks to populate a field of play, and an algorithm to match the corners and tally the "score" which will consist of how many of each type of symbols did you match.
Later, symbols will be spent to trigger abilities that effect either the board, a specific block, the player, or the player's enemy.
Each symbol will correlate with a role and each characters will have a distribution of what role he or she plays.
The roles and symbols are:
Role - Symbol
Tank - Shield
Controller - Star
Nuker - Sword
Healer - Cross
Classes
There are different classes and they basically denote how much health per level the character will have and what type of roles they fill.
Some example classes:
Guardian - high natural health, always has 2 tank abilities and 1 control ability.
Mage - low natural health, always has two nuke abilities and 1 control ability.
Assassin - medium natural health, always has three nuke abilities
An example character would be:
Name: Zenos
Class: Guardian
Health: 100 per level
Abilities:
Parry(shield ability)
Use Cost: 5 shield
Effect: The guardian deflects incoming damage aimed at any party member, damage deflected is 10% of the guardian's current health.
Unbeatable(shield ability)
Use Cost: 10 shield
Effect: increases the guardian's maximum health by 10%, stacks up to 3 times.
Taunt:(star ability)
Use Cost: 5 star
Effect: the next enemy attack targets the tank no matter who is targeted.
Shield Wall(passive ability)
Use Cost: none
Effect: Reduces the damage dealt to party members by 15% as long as the guardian lives
Unstoppable(passive ability)
Use Cost: 0
Effect: the Guardian is immune to stuns
As a character levels he gains access to more ability slots.
The above character would start with one slot(probably parry).
Abilities drop from completing events or a player can purchase a number of ability rolls.
Max level is determined by the number of abilities a character has. So you need to farm abilities to level your character up.
Ok, back to reality:
The playing field is an N x N array of cubes. Each cube has 4 corners with a symbol on each corner. You score symbols by matching them with an adjacent corner of another cube. If each corner of the cube is matched at least once then the cube explodes and awards double symbols.
If one corner has 4 matching cubes then all 4 cubes from that corner explode, awarding double points for each symbol.
The corner matching and moving and populating part is what I'm going to tackle for February. I'll have to build it to a "save point" per the concept outlined by the 1 Game A Month Challenge, and perhaps spend additional months on it if I'm enjoying the game.
