Game Design Idea – Puzzle-RPG (part 1)

Hey!

So I got inspired by someone to start a blog of my own to help get my ideas and whatnots down somewhere.

I figured to inaugurate this here blog I’d post up an idea I’d been musing on since Animex last week. On the Tuesday there was a presentation by Blitz Games about Codachain, a music based puzzle-arcade game involving collecting large chains of people and collecting musical notes. It got me thinking about how we look at different genres of games – when one thinks of music games they typically think of Guitar Hero or DDR, but Coda Chain can also, technically, be seen as a music based game.

So this lead on to the question about what other games do unique things with genres and how things could work. Over the summer I was addicted to Puzzle Quest (XBLA) which took an RPG and put a Puzzle element inside the game itself (the combat – for those who are unaware – is essentailly bejewelled). Now, puzzles in RPGs are hardly a new concept, anyone who has every played a Final Fantasy game or, indeed, any other RPGs will have encountered a puzzle at one point in the game.

So this leads to a development where we have:

• RPGs
• RPGs with Puzzles inside
• Puzzle RPGs (Puzzlequest, etc)

Is the next development in the chain an RPG Puzzle game?

Which brings me nicely onto my idea:

A puzzle game with an RPG inside it. It sounds a bit confusing, I know, but hear me out.
So you have a Puzzle game – let’s say Block Breaker or a similar Puzzle game – which acts as the map, within the puzzle box you have your character inside and each block broken reveals more of the map. Your character needs to get from A to B or whatever and you unlock parts of the map as you break blocks.

I don’t think I’ve explained that as well as I could have, I’ll get working on a mock up.

Of course, there are certain things to consider – how would combat work? RPGs centralise themselves around character development so how would that work? 

Addressing combat, one idea could be to have a secondary window within the game that could have a turnbased combat system inside it when necessary? Combat would need to be kept simple enough to not make the game confusing.

Statistics is another matter. Perhaps adjusting standard RPG statistics (Strength, Intelligence, Constitution, Agility etc) to a more puzzle-ised theme would work? In addition to the obvious combat enhancements, I mean. Strength would allow you to break more blocks, agility speeds up the rate inwhich blocks can be broken and your character would move and so on. Magic could be used in combat and out to adjust the flow (changing colours, area of effects and such) of the game.

I think I’ve only hit the tip of iceberg on this idea, so I’ll refine it and post back soon – maybe get some mockups and whatnot. Feel free to comment on this. 😉

 

– Chris out

~ by Chris Walter on February 11, 2009.