Day 4: sea creatures! Really happy with my little 8x8 sprites here, took a lot of iterations to get them right! Here are my puzzle plans:
- FISH: killed by jelly stingers, but then the skeleton can be hooked and used to cut stingers off
- CRAB: impervious to stingers and breaks through blockages, but it reduces your line length by [insert number here]
- JELLY: cannot be caught, body can't be passed through and stingers kill fish (but stingers can be cut, and maybe crabs kill them?)
- SQUID: impervious to stingers but leaves an impassable ink trail for the first [insert number here] moves after being hooked
- In each level you'll have to catch a certain number of creatures, which might be less than the total number since fish can be killed and jellyfish can't be caught.
When I was first brainstorming ideas for this game I made a big list of all the kinds of sea creatures I could think of (*). Then I went through and tried to think of gameplay mechanics for them, leaving me with 11, each of which only did one thing. Today I wanted to draw some sprites, which meant narrowing things down more, and then I remembered this quote:
"A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once." - Shigeru Miyamoto
So I started thinking more along those lines and ended up with the plan above. I don't think I'll add any other creatures; I think there's a lot of interactions and levels I can create from these 4. Tomorrow I'll start actually getting these mechanics in and finally start designing the puzzles!
(*) Here's the list, since it might help with your own fishy games:
- crab / lobster / shrimp / trilobite
- squid / octopus
- sardine / tiny fish
- angler / glowing thing
- electric eel / other electric things
- shark
- whale / dolphin
- walrus / seal / otter / manatee
- jellyfish
- clams / oysters
- coral / starfish / snails / anemone / urchins
- birds
- poisonous fish / lionfish
- large fish / sailfish
- turtles
- deep sea translucent stuff
- pufferfish
- stingray
- sea horse
- sea snake
- penguin