HelixFox | Games by Kyle Rodgers

As I mentioned last month, I am taking part in the fourth game development contest on the SA Forums. I haven’t posted a new entry since then so it’s about time I posted what I’ve come up with so far!

The Game: Clicky

The theme of the game needs to be ‘Dealing with the devil’ and the most obvious way to incorporate this into the game is through the plot, which is what I’m going to do.

You will play as Eric A. Goon. A lonely nerd who spends his days complaining on the World of Snorecraft forums about how overpowered Doom Knights are and how machineering sucks. His secret wish is to obtain a lady friend, but he is far too reclusive and fat to have any hope of this. Cue the Devil’s appearance. He offers Eric the his heart’s desire for female company in exchance for a small favour… Eric must help the Devil steal souls from people in his town and use these souls to rain down destruction to annihilate the entire population!

The basic gameplay has you looking at a city from a top-down perspective with people wandering around. You have to harvest souls from the people when they are vulnerable (happens occasionally) and these souls act as a form of currency used to invoke various demonic powers which you use to kill the population. The aim will be to kill the entire area as quickly as possible.

Originally you were going to play as the Devil himself and the deals made would be with the people in each level to get their soul. You were going to have a cash fund to use to buy the people material items to bargain for their soul, but that sort of system is far too complex for such a short development schedule. It would also have been too “minigamey” within the context of the greater game, making the regular gameplay much too complicated – simplicity is the key here, I think.

So I changed it to people becoming randomly vulnerable (when they glow red), with you able to click them during this time to get their soul. Once you have a person’s soul, they won’t become vulnerable again (they only have one soul, duh), but if you miss your chance then you would never be able to get that person’s soul.

I ended up changing this as well as I figured it kind of sucks if you miss your chance with the people as you then have to really focus on clicking every person you can, taking the focus away from using the devil powers. I changed it so people will become vulnerable again after 30 seconds if you miss them. As it stands now it’s a fairly “Plants vs Zombies”-esque method similar to picking up Sun in that game – a fairly constant stream of currency that you have to devote a minor amount of attention to to obtain (so you can’t simply ignore obtaining it). I kind of like this way as it encourages the player to get as many souls as they can, but you’re not screwed if you miss some.

The main objective is to kill everyone and the devil powers are how you’ll go about doing this. Right now the game has Imps, Minions and Hounds implemented, which are all Summon type powers. They work by you dragging them onto the game area, where they then run around trying to catch everyone and kill them. Eventually there will be other powers such as outright killing people in a certain area, scorching the ground (killing everyone who steps over it), spreading disease (killing anyone infected and also spreading itself around). The aim is that the various powers will synergise well with each other combinations needed for maximum success (e.g. using imps to herd people into a corner, letting you get more of them with a single death power).

I have until the end of this month to finish this off and there’s still lots to do, so I’d better get cracking!