Total (dis)Order

I think the hardest period of time in the creation of a game is the first week of development. You have a good idea for how the game will play (or at least one that you can go off of), and you’re generally excited about the project. You feel great about the whole thing as you open up Flash or Visual Studio or whatever, and then you see it: that terrible white screen that just taunts you, “Go ahead. Start writing.” It seems like it takes forever to get those first lines out, and when you do, you immediately second guess your design, your coding skills, and your existence as a human being. Well, maybe not that extreme, but you get the idea.

That first week is tough, and this week was no different.  This week, I started on a new Flash game that I’m tentatively calling WhichDoctor.  I’m looking for more creative, less pun-ish names, but here’s the general gist: you play as a witch doctor on a remote island.  You travel around the island, collecting amulets, visiting sick patients, and using the amulets to cast spells to cure said patients.  It’s all presented in a top-down, Zelda-style view, but with more tiki torches.  I’d consider it somewhat simply designed, but the cool thing is how it hooks into the autism research I’m working on.  Each “disease” that’s plaguing the island is characterized by a particular facial expression (e.g. angry, sad, surprised…), and the player can only use that to diagnose the illness.  For most players, this will be simple, but it will most likely be a challenge for children with autism.  Also, each amulet the player collects will be emblazoned with the face of a “god”, which is how players will distinguish them.  The images of the gods will actually be real photographs of human faces.  Again, distinguishing the amulets based on faces should be trivial for most players, but will provide an extra challenge for children with autism.

I’m still up in the air about what I want the overall goal of the game to be.  I’m leaning toward a legitimate story, however that would take a considerable amount of time to implement in code.  I’m also not terribly confident in my ability to write a compelling story.  Another option is to figure out a way to speed up the game a little, and then add some sort of high score, see-how-many-patients-you-can-cure element to it.  I’m more than accepting of ideas from the comments.

Oh, and if you ever find yourself in a similar situation to what I described in the first paragraph, might I suggest diagramming the code side of your game before you even start writing?  StarUML is a great tool for that, and it definitely saved me some time and more than a few tears.

I also managed to eek out a little art this week.  It’s not much, but here’s the door to all the island huts:

Posted in: Uncategorized by Ted / Tags: dev blog, Games, LFI, summer, WhichDoctor