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Desert Road Painter

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

Argh, the wysiwyg tables keep eating my text. Wysiwie tables more like.

So.. I didn’t have enough time this weekend to produce an entry but I made a mock-up and design sketch to ease the pain.

:: Desert Road Painter

This is a single button game. Press button down, paint starts spraying.. release button.. paint stops.

Your task is to repaint a set of fading road markings as accurately as possible. Each segment is rated and scored according to degree of accuracy. After 10 bad errors the game is over.

The game is pretty boring to start off with. It’s mostly just about getting a steady rhythm going and not becoming so hypnotised by the process that you screw up.

As time goes on, the desert starts to get to you. The long straight road feels static — as if only the rocks and dust to each side are actually moving. The sound of the paint hitting hot asphalt seems close and intimate. Memories start drifting through your consciousness, at first with clarity, but soon become confused and tangled with your senses.

It turns out the last guy who painted this stretch of road had the same problem. The strange creatures he saw hovering in front of him starting beating rhythms on his brain. The regular stream of painted segments became a rich sequence of syncopated markers; a secret language communicating ultimate truths about the world as it is.

Tags: design, LD13 - Roads, mockup
Posted in LD #13 - Roads - 2008 | 3 Comments »

Initial design thoughts

Posted by jolle

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

Except for doing such unproductive stuff as showering and doing laundry, I’ve drafted out the intial idea. Thought I’d share it with you.

Base tile types:
Clay - together with water and a worker gives bricks
Moutains - together with two workers gives stone
Forest - together with a worker gives wood
Field - together with a worker and water gives food
Water - nothing, but provides water to nearby hexes
Sea - together with a worker gives food

Created tile types:
Fundament - created from stone, allows for building tower, on rock it doesn’t require stone, on water it requires two rocks, and on sea three.

The tower:
Building new levels costs a bricks or stone and half that in wood per level already built, plus food for each worker, and as many workers as levels are also needed.

Workers:
You gain workers by area of influance. Area of influence is decided per tower level. 1-5: radius 1 (up to 6 workers), 6-10: radius 2: up to 6+13 workers. And so on.

Workers actions:
Workers can either build, produce or do nothing. Building costs food. Produce costs nothing.

Roads and channels:
Channels gives water to distant hexes. Roads makes it possible to transport goods. Costs nothing but a build action per hex. Can be built beyond influence point.

Ships: Allows fishing further away.

Alt. 2: Must build quarry, lumbermill, farm, brickmaker etc before getting resources from them. Or else have them as optional bonus givers? Could also build/work beyond influence, but at half speed?