So, I’ve been doodling with an oddball little concept recently. It’s an isometric game where there’s a minotaur loose in a pottery shop and it’s your job to not only protect the pottery, but to not hurt the minotaurs either. In some cases, there can be a whole lot of chaos going on, but you have no direct control over the action. You can only sort of direct where the minotaurs go, and you can trigger objects that will put the minotaurs to sleep.
So far, I’ve mainly been focused on the core mechanics and haven’t delved much into level design yet. I feel like there’s something good buried in this design somewhere… but I’m not sure if it shows. I feel like it might still be missing something.
The web build I have posted has 5 tutorial levels that introduce all the mechanics of the game. I haven’t made any levels yet where you start to “use what you’ve learned”. It’s posted here:
I’d love to get some feedback from people on the game so far. I am very curious to hear what other people think, good or bad. Just try to keep the negative feedback constructive, please.
Seems like there’s not too much to the mechanics right now. Maybe you could experiment with letting the player lay down a certain number of pots or instruments before the level starts to add a bit of strategy.
What do minotaurs have against pottery anyway? The more they smash the angrier they get, they’re crazy.
totally digging the name! it is difficult to control them though with Confusion spell, because of the random minotaur movement after they get de-spelled. But awesome job on the prototype!
There’s not much to the mechanics, but once you have 10 minotaurs to worry about going after dozens of jars across multiple screens, those few mechanics will keep you plenty busy.
I’ve since updated the web package with a couple post-tutorial levels that have much more going on in them. Give them a try and see what you think.
To be honest, for a while, I did toy around with the idea of allowing the player to move jars around, but ultimately decided that I didn’t like the idea. I preferred being able to set up jars in certain configurations that posed certain challenges and not have to worry about the player just moving a jar out of the way.
Yeah, when I thought of my idea I did a Google search and found that game. Couldn’t believe that someone had already thought of it. It was a really nice looking game, but I found the controls so terrible that I just couldn’t bear to play it.
Yea, I kind of get the impression that their game was more of something for fun. Its cute, but not terribly playable. Blurst was one of early developers of Unity web games, and they do have some fun stuff. Though most of their games seem like they threw a bunch words in a hat and picked them at random. Time Donkey is pretty funny.
So, the build has been updated with a few levels that are quite a bit more complicated (and interesting IMHO) than the original tutorial levels. Here’s an image from one of these levels.
I’m wondering if this is the kind of game that would be well-served by a global highscore list. I think I could code something up fairly easily w/ PHP and mySQL…
I’m also wondering about the control scheme for the Confusion. I was never really thrilled about the spinning thing, but I wanted something that took a bit of skill to get them to go in the right direction. Now I’m toying around with the idea of swiping in the direction you want a minotaur to move. That keeps movement sort of inexact and maybe still requiring skill to be good at it? I don’t know… still pondering.
I think the confusion spell mechanics are fine, but it might get very challenging when there’s too many minotaurs on screen. Maybe make them slow done while performing confusion spell on a single one? just an idea…
