Thursday, March 11, 2010

Ricky overview


The main idea of the game is using text instead of most of the game graphics, as well as in the quality of a gameplay element—in plenty of different ways. For example, a character would look like a compilation of letters of his name, turned in a specific way; a bird can be made of letters B (head), I (ii—body and eyes), R (ЯR—wings), D (tail); a comma is a boomerang; an exclamation mark is a rocket (or a sword); and dot is just a stone (or some kind of projectile).

The genre of the game is scroller/puzzle. The player can walk different routes, which can be found on the global map. After the player chooses one of the routes, they are transported onto the level screen. But between levels the player doesn’t have to stare at the global map all the time. For the sake of making the game world more diverse and live, there are also small capital levels, where friendly NPCs will give the main character (let us call him Ricky) different tasks.

Interaction with NPCs is executed the following way: Ricky approaches a character, who has a question mark over his head, then the main character gets an exclamation mark over his. After that the NPC turns to Ricky and explains what happened and what needs to be done within one animated dialog bubble. Then Ricky says “!!!”, the player’s global map gets refreshed, and a new level appears on it—the one on which the mentioned quest can be completed.

Main part of the gameplay in “Ricky” is completing puzzles with words. Puzzles are different tasks about composing words from letters. Letters can be used to build bridges, towers, roads, fieldworks. Moreover, depending on the level, a touch of action can be added via adding monsters, which try to bite the player, spit on them, make them slip or simply crush them. Regular monsters can be killed by shooting punctuation marks at them, while bosses need a special approach.

A boss dies when the player composes his name of letters, previously collected on the level. If the player hasn’t collected enough letters and has already encountered the boss, in order to get those letters, the player has to shoot the boss with their weapons and letters will fall on the ground one by one, where they can be picked up.

During game progress the player will earn a certain amount of points, which will appear on the leaderboard.

4 comments:

  1. That is such a cool art style, absolutely love it! I would love to see some word puzzle boss battles, like you could have one where their name was an anagram of the letters you had to use to defeat them.

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  2. That is exactly what boss battles will be about! And a bit more :-)

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  3. I really, really like the art style. Sounds like you could make a really interesting game with these ideas. :-)

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