Hard choices: designing mini-games, fit for a story. (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

This week I made a neat game design document - containing detailed descriptions of every mini-game I imagined in the past few months. It took me a while, but now I have 15 mini-games that are ready to be coded!

Now I never had much trouble comming up with game-ideas. But sometimes the game-ideas just don't really match the story they were intended for. And then I have no choice but to scrap the idea and replace it.

Now I thought it would be intersting to share two last minute changes I made because of this. And I’m curious if you agree with my reasoning for change :)

Here are the two ideas.

Making a droid-girl

Keen will eventually make his own droid-girl.  And I always wanted to make a mini-game forthis. Somy first idea was to make a sort of anatomy puzzle, where you had to place mechanical organs correctly into the droids body.

The organs were supposed to be interesting- by for example- having ventilators for lungs. And of course the reward would be ‘closing the hatch’ and seeing your droid in her full glory.  But when drawing this out, I realized that placing organs might actually be a bit creepy! Sooo, bad idea.

Well. Then I thought about a better alternative. And decided to go for a simpler mini-game, where you just have to puzzle together the outside of the droids body. I think this version is less origional, but a much better fit for the main game. And now it looks like this :)

Cutting back the roots

During Sophie her story, Keen will trim down a plant with a hedgecutter. Right now this is just dialog scene, but I always wanted to add a mini-game here.

So for over a year, I had this idea to create a ‘whack a mole’ type game- where you would need to cut away 'flowers', before too many of them would appear on screen (knocking Keen out with the plants gas).

And so I made this set-up.

Visually and gameplay-wise, it really works together I think. But at the same time it also tells the wrong story-  and that bugged me.  I mean, you’re not cutting away roots, and knocking out Keen was never really the plan here.

So I had to do a step back, and try and make something that would better fit the story.  And then I made this set-up.

Here you simply have to cut away ever regrowing roots, by clicking on the root-ends.  Clear the screen before your hedgecutters battery runs out, and you win! It actually requires a bit more tactic then the first idea, so perhaps it’s even more fun & rewarding?

Well, those were my last-minute changes. I hope you found it interesting!

And then there are 13 more mini-games I designed...but more on that later :)

All the best!

Robin