Core Game-play: The Drunk Experience
So far, for our project , Maria and I have created a story: a teenager stumbled upon a large underground cellar and decided to drink quite a few of the bottles dry. His movement is impaired, but what we say in Bulgaria is “God protects the crazy and the drunk!” Somehow this person isn’t in trouble…but he’s very very lost, and what happens when he discovers a secret hidden passageway behind a load of stacked barrels? Well…
Trap Door Ideas:
Our initial idea for a trap door stemmed from Mariya’s experience with Minecraft and being able to create so many different blocks and places with one’s own hands.
The Ideas of Beyond the Trap Door:
- An alleyway in the night that this leads out into
- A bar
- A the jungle dungeon where the grapes are grown…
We selected the third idea, the Jungle Dungeon where Grapes are Grown. How good and special should the grapes for amazing, intoxicating wine be? What happens if the grapes have gone bad? Does anyone/anything protect or keep us away from finding the secret formula for the wine? So many ideas we could explore.
My initial worry was how we would pull off the grapevines in blender. As someone who lives in a wine-producing country, I’ve seen what grapevines look like. They have very particular leaves, and as plants they grow to immense sizes, usually hanging from above. Mariya told me not to worry and that it’s largely texturizing, and I trust her.
The concept art for the dungeon we found that we liked was this one (minus the skeletons):
This gave us solid ideas with how to incorporate the barrels and Maria and I liked it instantly. The concept of warm light off of somewhere works good, and we found that since grapes are hanging we could have the constant splash of green in the form of the vines just growing overhead as the player walks.
The Overall Concept Idea:
Perhaps…this could be a dungeon where the secret of making the perfect wine was hiding, and the goal was the recipe ingredients hiding around a series of rooms in the wine dungeon? A work in progress idea, for sure, but we like it. Just having the player look around each room, wobble around, pick up an ingredient, then put them all in a barrel and CONGRATULATIONS! YOU WIN! There’s definitely fleshing out to be done, but it sounds promising and fun.
