DECO2300 Dark Horse Prototype

I have recently created the 'Dark Horse' prototype for Minestructor. This third iteration of my design idea completely reworked the ideas that It had originally been based off.

Whilst not a point of criticism, one crying result of players competing against one another whilst playing my game was a phenomenon I would like to call 'rushing'. A player 'rushes' when they indiscriminately race to the end of the mine field, disregarding the mine proximity prompts and gambling on there being less than three mines in the line directly in front of them. The use of obstructers had previously mitigated this phenomenon, however, if players ran out or forgot to use them, the winner of the match would almost always be the player that rushed to the finish. For this prototype I wanted to make players more aware of the mines and traverse the field more carefully.

I had initially intended to include a physical representation of each mine runner, who would have their limbs blown off as each life was lost. This gave me the idea of limiting player turns after each consecutive life was lost. By allowing careful players a greater quantity of moves, I would hope to encourage strategic game play over risky rushing.

On top of this re-working of the life and movement system, I decided to completely scrap the turn based mouse model of my previous prototypes in favor of a modern keyboard input model.This would allow players to simultaneously move together as they traversed the map.

Players will be allowed a combination of vertical and horizontal moves every 2 seconds(players can conduct twice as many horizontal moves than vertical ones) and operating the obstructer cannon can be done independently of moving. Players will collect obstructers and nades as they discover '?' tiles, which they may fire at their opponents via a cannon connected to their sprites.