endless climber/jumper - planning phase
Per the topic, I'm starting to think about an endless climber/jumper game using Game Maker Studio and trying to think about game mechanics...I'd love any advice or feedback on the same.
The idea is that you have to climb out of a volcano before the lava catches up to you. Yes, I know you'd never survive the heat or the toxic gases, but that's not important right now. This will be windows/mac/html5 only...no mobile.
My model is to fix the player in a verticle position and allow free movement left/right to avoid obstacles
Pressing the up key will cause the background and obstacles to scroll down to simulate movement. Background and obstacles don't scroll when pressing left/right/down keys.
The lava will rise UNLESS you press the up key (in other words, you stop climbing and the lava starts gaining on you).
Obstacles include non-pass-through ledges, gaps in the rock wall, explosive lava bursts, and various cave critters.
Open to all suggestions and/or feedback. Let me know and I can post a screen of the rough mockup I did (no art, just a sketch).
I like to have four themes that I look towards in helping to brainstorm/refine gameplay mechanics.. for something like this I might choose..
Good resource for enemy/obstacle design: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/GarretBright/20140422/215978/Build_a_Bad_...
UHM.. and I dunno a good resource for lists of gameplay mechanics.. but..
Core Dynamics
Territorial Acquisition
Prediction
Spatial Reasoning
Survival
Destruction
Building
Collection
Chasing/Evading
Trading
Twitch Mechanics
Chance Mechanics
Tradeoff Mechanics
Puzzle Types
Compiled these lists from the book "Challenges for Game Designers" and more info about them can be found in it.. x.X;; Your library might have access to atleast the e-book version..
Cool thanks a lot for the resources. These will come in handy in some of my other projects too.