Work in progress: Schooled

Whilst resourcing stock artwork for another project, I discovered some super stock photography of chalkboards, complete with informational sticky notes and inspirational messages.

This immediately prompted an idea for a quirky, not-quite-complete puzzle/adventure game idea.

So, between other projects and obligations I've started to think about it in some more detail because, well, in my head it looks really good. I'm not sure this has any real marketable/commercial value so I figured it'd be best to make use of it as a learning and blogging exercise. I'm writing this in a contemporary fasion - the idea is no more or less developed than it appears right here.

The stock artwork is made up of stuff like this:

And this:



The idea is to have the sticky notes draggable, and missing/jumbled/out-of-place when the player begins the adventure. The text-only (signpost) boards will allow players to pick up notes and provide filler between the puzzle boards (which will initially have blanks in place of the sticky notes). As the player completes a puzzle board, one or more sides will fall away allowing them to drag/scroll on to another part of the adventure. Ultimately, all boards would be revealed and the player would have completed the puzzle - a top down view of the entire map of boards could act as a progress meter (and a map, obviously).

A sample signpost board may look like this:



(Ignore the terrible mockups at this stage - lots more work is needed on getting the quality of splicing sorted as well as meaningful icons / interactive areas.)

Players would be able to drag sticky notes from the "pick me up" section to their bag, i.e.:



In this example, the player would be able to get all three sticky notes in their bag:



Dragging the board to the left (moving to the right) would take the player to a puzzle board:



The player would need to drag the sticky notes into the correct places. Completing the puzzle board would open up one or more sides to further exploration:



That's essentially as far as it goes at the moment... next up is figuring out how to make it a challenge to move the notes around to the correct spots without trial and error being the easiest option. Boards such as the one below will rely on the player having some common sense...



...but would still be simple if all the notes are found near to one another. Key here will be distributing notes in pickup spots in many places.

To present a further challenge, the bag size could be restricted such that players have to make choices about which notes to move around. This could change over time - allowing the player more slots further through the adventure/puzzles.

This still may turn out to be either too simple, too abstract or just plain dull. We'll see. There are 300+ boards to play with and plenty of blanks screaming out for further adaptation.

Thoughts, comments and ideas welcome - I'll report back once the puzzle element is nailed down.

Ideas - Retro Redhead

This one may never get past these sketches, so for now it can live here. There's a whole lot of information missing but it was essentially a pacman-style thing that involved getting the girl through the city. Each level or part of the map would involve different, recurring characters.

Ah, hang on - these were sketches for a different game that had almost exactly the same playing surface. The artwork in the next sketch gave it away - Retro Redhead was based around some iStock vector characters.