Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Game Idea #2: Ex (Within)

Game Idea #2: Ex (Within)
When feeling lost, sometimes you'll only be able to find the path within yourself...

High Concept:
Ex (Within) is a puzzle kind of game, that takes places in a sole box. Your avatar is a faceless robot with a weird antenna that glows in various colors that can be for emotions or something it reacts to. Your mission is to solve the riddle of the box and get out of there.

Platform:
Handhelds

Why it needs to be made:
The market is overflowing with mindless action games and sports games. There's not much competition currently on the puzzle market except from Nintendos Brain Age. The game will be filling a spot where demand is bigger than the available products.

Description:
The game starts out with you as the robot waking up inside the box. Next to you are some crates and you can see red square markings on the floor. There's a door positioned weirdly in the ceiling. By moving the crates to the red squares (ala Sokoban), the room will flip over and you'll be able to access the door.

When entering the door, you disappear and the door moves from the floor up to the ceiling again. The door in the ceiling opens and you fall out of it into the same box again, but this time with another puzzle.

The possibilities of what kind of puzzles you'll be able to create for this, is endless, and the door can be positioned anywhere on the 6 faces of the box. One thing important for the game, is that there shouldn't be any kind of text, but instead utilize lights and symbols to hint the player of what to do.

Why it will be fun:
It's a challenge to go from puzzle to next puzzle, and it's rewarding to figure them out and make progress, to see how far you can go, or even complete the game (get out of the box). It's easy to pickup and start playing anytime, anywhere. You can spend 5 minutes to complete one puzzle and put the game aside to take it back up later, or you can spend several hours just playing through the game.

Final thougths:
This idea was spawned for our "Big Game Project" that was for the end of our last term. Due to the lack of my programming skills, I decided upon making a Oblivion mod instead, but that got quickly overruled and I got to do some work for an actual game company instead.

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