Assignment 3 - Some more thoughts

I'm going to confess that I've not got much in the way of work done today. I had a very late night, and the day has been a lazy one as a result. However, I have at least been letting ideas stew in the ragged bunch of cells I call my brain in that time.

My mind has almost inevitably wandered towards how I am doing to work with a time mechanic... originally, the idea of the player recording their actions was more of a plot device rather than a gameplay feature, designed to intwine with the story as the main character explores the environment. So needless to say, making this into a big part of the gameplay is going to radically alter my original vision, which is by no means a bad thing... indeed, I think it is going to add to the game concept massively. I'm trying to keep my ideas grounded and reasonable with todays technology... if I weren't, then I could be as wild as I felt like.

So at present, I'm working on how time would function within the game and serve as an overarching aspect of any puzzles and combat that might result in each playthrough. As I mentioned in class, the game is set within a time loop over the span of 5 days or so, and without interaction, the gameworld will follow a set chain of events that will endlessly repeat with every time loop. The player can collect vinyl records that will record a ghost of his actions and which will follow the player's previous actions.

It will be within that premise that any puzzles will be derived from. An obvious application for this would be for the player to activate a switch that would unlock a door elsewhere, and then go back in time to go through the previously locked door when his ghost pulls the switch. I'm also thinking of how else this could function, and one other way to use the mechanic would be if a player needed to steal an item from an npc. Unable to in the first playthrough, the player instead talks to the npc and distracts them, and so when the player goes back in time once again, his ghost will be distracting the npc whilst the player sneaks past in order to acquire the item needed to progress. As the game progresses and the player manages to travel further and further into the story, more vinyl records will be available to create puzzles that involve more than two lives to create a solution.

I'm also giving due consideration to how the player will collect items. I don't think that allowing them to keep everything that they find along the way will be particularly challenging, but that being said, it would easily grow tedious to have to collect key items repeatedly... which gives rise to the concept of the player being able to store some items in a box that exists outside of time, limited in the amount of slot spaces available but allowing him to store items that he might need in the future.    

Lousy, I know. I'll keep thinking.