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Game design question : how to make a "trapped" player character? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

47 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have an idea for a game: It's the usual "a princess is kidnapped by a dragon and a brave knight is on a quest to rescue her" story. But you (the player) plays as the princess, who is somehow helping the knight on his quest.

The issue is that since the player is playing as a trapped character, I want to make the player feel trapped, but I don't know how to do that.

My original idea is that the princess telepathically communicates with the knight and tells him what to do. But this doesn't work, the gameplay is identical to the player playing as the knight. How can I make the gameplay feel like the player is playing as the princess (and thus feel trapped) instead of the knight?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thank you for the detailed response. The gameplay loop I have in mind is a puzzle game where the thing you're trying to do is usually easy, but you're limited in some way that makes it hard. An example I gave in another comment is : write a computer program that adds two numbers, but you're not allowed to use the + symbol.

I really like your idea of "beneficial spell". I think maybe the knight and enemies are autonomous, and the princess can only do a single action to make the knight succeed.

I remember playing a game like this. It's based on Conway's game of life. The goal is to flip a single cell to make all the cells die after a certain number of turns.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah, you could maybe combine the sliding-tile-puzzle thing with the beneficial spell so you're not just sitting there watching everything play out with nothing to do (though autobattlers are apparently a thing so maybe that'd be fine?)

Also, if you happen to find that game based on Game of Life I'd like to give that a shot, sounds interesting.