Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Enemies and obstacles reduce the amount of health as well. Being shot, the main
character loses an amount of health points; this value may depend on the exact
place of the hit, and it is obvious that the head costs more than an arm. To add some
specularity, it is good to illustrate the hit locations by trickles of steam escaping the
AMU. The autoregeneration that converts the oxygen into health points and fixes the
suit should not start immediately after a hit. Let it take several seconds to activate or
the protagonist is required to leave the line of fire.
Optionally, special critical zones can be introduced in the game. Small areas at the
corners of the Unit may be turned into very delicate sections; being hit, they switch
off some specific functions. For instance, an enemy shoots at the left corner of the
suit where one of the maneuvering engines is placed. After such an incident, the
player cannot turn to the right because the engine is down.
To fix it, the player must play a special mini-game that looks like a match-3 puzzle.
The mini-game's mechanics are similar to the moving columns game mode de-
scribed in
Chapter 5
,
Puzzles
. The HUD displays a so-called repair window with sev-
eral columns in it; their number may depend on the degree of the damage that the
protagonist was subject to or on the difficulty level of the game. According to the plot,
the engine has lost its wire connection with the CPU. The player needs to fix this by
scrolling the bars with different variants of geometric shapes and searching for cor-
rect fragments. In other words, this is a simple connection puzzle. It should not be
complex. An average player must collect it in a few seconds, because this is only a
way to diversify the main gameplay via a sudden pause.
During the game's progression, some form of RPG-mechanics may be implemented.
For instance, special upgrades can be offered to players so that they can increase
the capacity of the oxygen bar or the health bar. Alternatively, so-called patches can
be used by finding such an element in the game. A player can decrease the speed
of consuming a specific resource, for example, oxygen patch 5 percent may reduce
the consumption of oxygen by 5 percent.
