For our project we started with a basic maze idea that we’ve developed into a better story. The player is inside a building with ten rooms. Each room has different things in it, and the player needs to use the items to help them escape the building. Originally the project was going to take on more of a stranded in the woods story line, where the story line would have been something like this:
“You’ve just woken up and feel groggy; the last thing you remember is getting a couple drinks with friends. You look around and realize you are surrounded by trees and shrubs. However you can see what looks like a path that you may have formed on your way here. You analyze the path and realize that you can either go left or right
Right: you walk around the corner and hear a rustling in the bushes after further investigation you realize there is a poisonous snake in the bushes and before you have the chance to jump back it strikes. You have no chance of recovering from this so you die! Start Over?
You can’t start over dummy you’re dead.
Left: you walk down the path, but it is still dark out, you have the feeling that something could be watching you. As you continue down the path you hear wolves howling in the background and they sound like they are getting closer. You are getting very nervous and start to run, when you come to a fork in the path one to the left and one to the right which do you choose?”
However after discussing the idea we decided that this idea was probably too simple and wouldn’t really challenge the player since you would just be guessing left or right the entire time. So the team decided that it might be better to challenge the player intellectually. This gave us the idea of the ten rooms seen below. Each room has items inside it and some are necessary to get put and some are not.
Working on this assignment as a team has been very beneficial because it allows us to pool different ideas and mesh them together. I find it very interesting to see how people with different backgrounds and majors can contribute to an idea and continue to keep making it better. Personally this exercise is very helpful to me because the computer science majors that I have for partners are able to do an excellent job at explaining any questions I have regarding the coding portion of the assignment.
Eloquently written Jacob. I really appreciate you laying out your thought process and putting it all on the line for us. I think that the lost in the woods idea is actually a great one, although I do agree that it is a little bit too simple for a text based adventure game. The 10 rooms game is an impressive idea. I have played similar games on sites such as addictinggames.com. These games were a lot of fun and reading this post gets me amped up to play yours once it is released. Creating this game is no small task, so I wish you the best.