1. “The name of the game”

Don't worry, I'm not going to be crowbarring in ABBA songs titles each week 🙂
For this first post, I'll talk about which game I've decided to do and why I picked that one above others.
When I initially came up with the concept (which currently has no name apart from the dryly self-explanatory 'Drilling Game') it was a simple 2D side-on game where the player has control of a drilling machine and has to, well, drill down through the surface to reach goodies hidden beneath.
I was thinking along the lines of Mr Driller/Dig Dug and contemplating whether rocks would fall on you, what types of deposits you would be after and so-on. I was also debating over whether to go grid movement like the above mentioned classics, that is the player can only move up/right/left/down by one grid square, or whether I would be different and have freeform movement.
It was a toss-up between this one and another 2D game – a top-down viewed puzzler. I picked this one as the other game would, by it's nature, require some fancy graphics and animation along with analogue control and quite a lot of AI programming. This one could be grittier and I envisaged a retro look which would be less time consuming to create. From the get go 3D was totally out of the question, simply because of time required to create assets.
The old truth is indeed true: you are best to start off simple if you want to finish anything. This doesn't mean you can't learn a lot by diving in at the deep end, just don't expect to have a completed game when you're done.
However, as soon as I started thinking about this game for more than, ooh 2 minutes, my imagination took over. Here are some of my unedited scribbled notes:
– Play prospector/miner for company on alien world
– Have a base and scanning machine and transporters and drillers
– During sleep send big scanner out on path – picks up general signals
– Then decide where want to dig that day, drive out there (or taken) and start drilling
– When drilling can choose direction (in 2D – 3D would be a nightmare 🙂 ) and send pulse scans to get higher detail. Then drill around to reach metal deposits and areas of interest
– Areas include: soft ground, hard ground, empty space (tunnels, chambers), metallic deposit (deposit, alien artefact, structure), flowing (magma, water etc.)
– Driving – selects grid they want before head out then must navigate there – obstacles, gaps, maybe explosives?
– Maybe get deliveries of fuel, drill heads, O2 etc – dropped nearby and collect
– Can damage transport/drill/suit and needs repairs?
– At base can access top grid and subgrids and info on each – in drill only have access to deep scan to navigate, then local scan as approach, then actual knowledge
As you can see, this has gone from a simple 2D side-on drilling game where you collect stuff to a game with scanning (of various types), a driving section, alien artefacts and structures, some kind of computer where you can view scans of each area you visit, drill upgrades, possible fuel limits etc, and that's only page one of my written notes. In fact, at the start of page two, my list of player goals are:
1. Scan whole grid around base
2. Investigate all/most diggable zones
3. Collect ore for processing
4. Discover and collect alien artefacts
5. Discover alien ruins
6. Piece together artefacts
7. Unlock centre of alien ruins – platform and maybe drill there
Oh yes, not only collecting ore, but artefacts which can be pieced together and indeed an alien civilisation to unearth under your base! Dig Dug this isn't. Not to mention the little note in goal 7. – platforming. Yes, the idea was slowly coalescing in my cortex to have not only the side-on drilling, and possibly driving, but also to incorporate side-on platforming, deep beneath the surface.
I needed to think on this and decide exactly where I was going.
NEXT TIME: The game mechanics, and yet more ideas surface.