Core Mechanics

Design Constraints

Because the game is a casual game, the main criteria I had for each of these mechanics is that they should be very easy to learn and stand on their own as a challange. But their appliance comes in many different ways where lateral thinking comes around the corner. The player is challenged en encouraged to discover it's little secrets and so fort building a mental model of how they work inside the game world.

Combining mechanics is challenging and because we only have nine weeks to make the full game, they have to be simple in order to minimize the balancing of them when they are combined. We already made a level with a combination and even with these simple mechanics it can get really challenging. Right now these mechanics will all be present in the game, but maybe one of them will be removed due to complexity and deadlines or design quality.

Tile mechanic

The first core mechanic of the game is the sliding tiles. Each tile contains a piece of platform that the player will use in different ways to accomplish a level. The player switches from screen mode (zoomed out, where he can move the tiles but not move the player or use mechanics) to field mode (zoomed in, he can move the character around and use the other mechanics).

Grow mechanic

The grow mechanic can grow objects by moving them right or shrink them by moving them left.

Reflect mechanic

With the reflect mechanic, you reflect an object from one position of the screen to the other.

Duplicate mechanic

Although I don't have a movie of this mechanic, it works quite simple as well. The player can duplicate himself (younger version). When it is turned on, the player can only move around the duplicated version of himself. Time is stopped when the mechanic is triggered and the duplicated Leon can move around, trigger/grab things and move things around. Playtesting needs to point out if this mechanic needs to be constrained because it offers so much freedom and can therefore break the game.