Week 5: Design

Water Water Everywhere!

Ok, so I’ve finished my two reports due this Sunday, and now it’s time to tackle another design task!

I’m not entirely sure if I’ll be able to describe my vision clearly, but here it goes. It would be a simple browser flash game, with the object of the game to collect all of the water or fluid or whatever it may be, at some container at the bottom of the screen. For now the actual story/theme/actual nature of the depicted images and fluid are not important, and wouldn’t be that important; it is the gameplay mechanics I am describing. For now, suffice to say that water is being poured from a bottle and it is your objective to collect it in a bucket at the bottom. Of course however, this objective wouldn’t be as easy as it seems, as there would be various obstacles in the way, and it would be up to the player to devise a sort of Rube Goldberg-esque path for the water to flow into the bucket. In this way it would provide an interesting visual and puzzle solving experience for the player.

To make it a little more interesting however, I would do away with the simple “drag item onto the screen here, and it will magically stay in place and direct things where you want them to go”. Instead, just as the fluid obeys laws of physics, so would these objects you can use – no magical invisible strings here! They would react and move under the pressure of the water, and players would perhaps even need to use this to reach their objective (maybe the player needs to create a pool for the fluid to fill, with an anchor attached to a floating ball that they could then rest a plank on once it is filled with water or some such complicated thing to reach a goal). There could also possibly be levels where there are already pools of other fluids, that react in various ways, but the player could be constrained in ways such as making sure the water they want collected isnt contaminated (or even has to pass through these other fluids, or dissolve some substances etc etc). Perhaps even in later in the game, most of the levels would be already filled with the other fluid, and the player must build objects that get the desired fluid to the container with minimal contamination, trying to stem diffusion of the desired fluid or some such thing.

EDIT: I forgot about points! Since clearly every game needs points! (As if the satisfaction of getting water into a bucket wouldn’t be incentive enough!) I suppose players could be scored on how quickly they make their creations or how complex they are, how much fluid they spill, etc etc.

For a really ambitious project? I’m thinking a fully 3D interactive world, with realistic physics (things filling up, seeping out, knocking over, flooding) and really diverse objects, from plastic tubes to kitchen strainers to umbrellas to sponges etc etc. Perhaps even the bucket/bottle you’re trying to fill could be knocked over, so the player must be careful to not let too much fluid flow or something. Now that I think about… I’d really like to see a realistic water slide type simulator/creator – I’d probably have a lot of fun with an empty room and a bunch of pipe and other objects and some water in the real world, and this sort of sand-boxy experience as a computer game could be pretty interesting.