Game Design Idea – Puzzle RPG (Part 4)

Holy Brainwaves, Batman! This update might not seem impressive to y’all but I had to get this down because it can potentially change everything I’ve thought about so far (or a fair bit of it). Oh, and thanks for those who have been checking this every day despite a few days of no updates – Gears of War, Left4Dead and World of Warcraft got in the way – sorry!

So I have what’s called an Idea Mine – this is essentially my Sketch Book, on Thursdays I’m left with over an hour before heading do a room with the necessary software to catch up with assignments in which I sit in the cantine with my Sketch Book just doodling any ideas that come into my head. It’s a useful process and anyone who’s reading this that’s on a Games Design course should give it a go – most of my ideas on this particular idea have come to me in that small window.

In any case, I was Mining for Ideas (I know, right!?) just now and I got to thinking about a few things. I settled last week on developing this idea with the Nintendo DS in mind so I had to think of the gameplay for the top screen – having already decided that the bottom screen would likely be a puzzle game.

I looked at the video that Dan O’Brien (holla!) linked in a comment back in Part 2 and I was originally planning something in a similar vein but it hit me – it wouldn’t be an RPG! It’d be a Puzzle Platformer which isn’t what I’m going for.
So I started doodling out little thumbnails (also useful) for gameplay concepts and I stumbled across a simple yet brilliant idea:

What if it were turnbased and controlled by the puzzle?

Uh oh, this is falling into Puzzle Quest territory, right? Not quite, the top screen would play like a Tactics RPG or similar to it – the Bejewelledesque puzzle on the bottom screen would provide the player with actions depending on how many blocks or whatever were broken (so you break 4 movement blocks you can move 2 spaces or some such) and you’d have a “pool” where you can stock up on attacks or movements or whatever. The idea would be to get your character from A to B and probably attack anything that gets in the way.

I know it’s a simple idea and I’ll probably think of a better one soon and react the same way, but I had to get it down!

I was also thinking about Characters and Story – you see, I’ve been part of a little community for the RPG Maker series of programs for around 9 years now and I’ve always tried to start a “project” with it, but I always started with the characters and when it came to getting the story work done I got lazy, thus the projects never got off the ground. This time I’m brainstorming strictly gameplay mechanics but once that’s done – wouldn’t I need a story to put into the gameplay to make it interesting? I certainly would.

Check back later this week, for you see my Idea Mine struck gold and there’s not enough Gnomes (World of Warcraft Gnomes are the Miners in my brain. I know, I know) on staff to filter all the Ideas through efficiently at the moment.

~ by Chris Walter on February 19, 2009.