Falling Blocks

I suppose I forgot to mention in that last post that I won't be dedicating all my time to an online game. Doing that would be insane. Instead, I'm leaving it on the shelf to fester in my mind and, when I have some free time and no other projects going on, I'll draw up some graphics or jot down some design ideas, and when I have tons of time, I'll put some effort into the programming. The networking stuff is a pretty daunting a task, so it's not something I want to go into unless I'm sure I'll come out alive and sane. So basically, don't worry. It's still there, even if I'm caught doing other things.

Here is one of those other things: a simple game design that will be a good opportunity for me to play with the Flash platform (which I am completely fascinated by. Read this and Danc's magical words may convert you as they did me). The basic idea is simple: the player controls a character who is caught in a small, but very tall room. Blocks are constantly falling from somewhere up above. The goal is to avoid the falling blocks when they fall, and to jump up onto them once they do such that you are in a good position not to get squashed, and to jump even higher when more blocks fall. The room  is an isometric 4x4 grid, and the player is only able to hop a single block height at a time.

The "jump on top of falling blocks" isn't a new concept at all, though I'm not sure it's been done isometrically (feel free to prove me wrong). Of course, I wouldn't be able to sleep if I knew I was making a game in an existing mini-genre without adding something new, so here are some ideas I have:

• Power ups that fall from the sky and let the player do things like hop two blocks at once, or survive a single block crush.
• Stages. Once the player reaches a certain threshold of height, the blocks all fall out from underneath the level and the room is back at square one, but this time blocks fall faster.
• As the player gets higher and higher, blocks appear faster because they have less time to fall.
• Bombs that occasionally fall instead of blocks. Run away from these. They are bad.

One problem that plagues all falling block games is that there is a high potential to get stuck in a situation that just isn't possible to get out of if the player just tends to be really unlucky with where the blocks fall. So some algorithm has to be devised that tries to reduce this risk. I'm imagining something along the lines of "preference goes to filling an entire level before adding too much to the next level(s)." Of course, done wrong, this could make it too easy. I suppose this is one of those things that you fine tune in playtesting.

Finally, here's a simple mock-up of what the falling block might look like. Notice the shadow that indicates a block is about to fall. This will help the player decide where to go before a block comes down and crushes him.

I'll try prototyping this in Flixel, but if I get as frustrated as I did the last time I tried using it, I'll flip over to PushButton Engine, which may be overkill, but I'm happier with overkill than mind-numbingly infuriating.

Until next time, in the Land of Dinosaurs,

-Isaac