Aims
I know that the brief’s rational mentions doing a prototype of the actual space, but when I saw the title, one of my favourite science fiction short stories just came across my mind, and I had a strong desire to use it as inspiration for a parkour game about a space miner who tries to escape a giant smooth concave mirror in space. It seems this one combined the brief of this one with escape game and unity engine game?
Sketches
Design detail
Background: The protagonist is a space miner whose daily job is to travel in space to explore other planets for new energy sources. When he arrives on a strange planet, he falls into a deep pit in the shape of a concave mirror, thousands of kilometres in diameter, made of unusually smooth material and with zero friction, he was only accompanied only by his toolkit and other strange objects that have fallen in by accident too. Mechanics: The movement can be only generated by friction, and friction can only be generated by the interaction between players and items. The player has to use his interaction with the toolkit to generate friction to move, and then gradually meet other objects and can use their physical properties to move in various ways, with the player's speed gradually increasing as the game progresses. Camera: 2.5d Highlight ideas: Smooth mirrors reflecting the galaxies of the universe! Perhaps these virtual stars could be designed as bonus props with varying attributes, such as some stars that briefly speed up the protagonist and others that restore stamina levels (it makes sense to see beautiful stars that restore the player's stamina levels! This would require a health system)
Critical reflection
I have so many ideas for this game, but I’m currently stuck at a very frustrating stage: I can’t imagine how to make an interesting level out of such a big, empty, deep pit, and it’s also under the situation of my intention to make the player accelerate along with the game process (I wanted to make the player feel the excitement of survival in such way, so the overall emotional curve will be an upward trend). In this regard, I focused on the interaction: the player will learn the tutorial by interacting with the toolkit at the first time to get into the mechanics, and then gradually progress to various other objects that accidentally fall into the pit, and to interact with virtual star mirrors.
However, there is still a lack of structured level design, which really requires an urgent update….