The different suits of Mary

Continuing on our five weeks project spoken about in the previous post.

This week we first had a brief meeting discussing the basic mechanics of the games. How the character is going to move, shoot etc. We changed a few things. First, we would have the game runt from room-to-room, but now we decided on a continuously moving screen not locked to the player avatar. We decided this because it would offer a better flow to the game, and a bigger challenge if the player was always forced to move, never being able to stand still.

So the avatar is always in movement, even if you don’t touch the forward key. If you touch it, you will speed up, hence moving forward. If you press the backwards key you will slow down, but you can’t stop, as you reach the left edge of the screen it will continue to push you forward no matter how much you press the backwards key.

The player will move through a level full of enemies that will shoot randomly, and the avatar will defend itself by shooting as well. The avatar takes damage when hit by enemy fire or colliding with one. The avatar has three health points and will die and the level will reset when those three lives run out.

During our second meeting we built our paper prototype. We made a simplified grid-based version of a level. The player always moves one step forward each turn, but can additionally choose to take one step forward, backwards, up or down. Backwards is only available if the frame allows it. Onto of the board is a frame, that also moves one step forward each turn, illustrating the continuously moving screen in the game. We have yet to playtest enough to figure out how the battle will work, but there is monsters and projectiles as well.

So, as for the story of the game. The game begins during a public demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. Bell call’s up a volunteer from the audience, which is the avatar of the game, Mary. There is two telephones on the stage. Bell makes picks up one and makes a call to the second, and Bell is to answer that one. But behind the scenes Elisha Gray, Bell’s self-proclaimed nemesis is fumbling with the cables, wanting to sabotage Bell’s demonstration. But something far more unexpected happens. Too much electricity enters The telephone, and when Mary picks up the telephone she is sucked into it. She comes out through another telephone, during world war 1.

Mary has traveled through time, and now it is her mission to find her way back to Bell’s demonstration back in the late 1800-centry. She has to find a working ringing telephone (the one she came through broke). She will be opposed by static creatures that interferes with the phone call and has to fight her way through. When she reaches another phone she is taken further into the feature, going through the 30ies, 50ies, 70ies and finally 2010, where at Bell’s museum she will find the original phone and be able to return home.

As for the personal work I have done so war for this project I’ve made the different outfits of Mary. At each level, which is another era Mary has a different outfit, a different suit, that is proper to that time. That is how we included “suit” into our game. “Telephone” I think is pretty obvious how we included it.

Until next time.

Different suits of Mary