Hive-Heart is currently working as the production/design crew for Sonder Studios. They're are new to game development so their first project is a recreation of a simple yet delightfully complex classic: Pac-Man.
So, of course, as designers we had to wonder how we could make this recreation different from the original, while still keeping the general feel of the game. And we came up with one mechanic: Sprinting
(I'm showing a bit of our early notes. Since early design and pre-production is mostly decision-making we don't have any interesting art to attach yet)
But of course, mechanics aren't all we had to tweak. We realized in Pac-Man when you take a hit, the game stops and regroups all the ghosts in their base and moves Pac-man to his default location. We wanted to eliminate that small interruption to make the gameplay more dynamic and fast paced. And to do that we simply changed from lives to health. When the player gets hit, they'll simply loose health and keep playing until they loose it completely and get a game over. Then they'll have to start the level again.
This is a small change system-wise, but changes to the player's perception of the system greatly affect gameplay. To still give the players the breathing room that og Pac-Man gives after getting hit, we're adding a slight moment of invincibility so that they can realocate safely. One of Sonder's programmers was concerned that players would use this invincibility to easily gather pellets in ghost-infested corners, so we decided to try making them unable to collect pellets while invincible.
(Again, sorry for the thrashy art, all our notes, diagrams and illustrations are used to more easily communicate the decisions to the team and ourselves)
It was decided that the game would be set in a haunted mansion, and the protagonist would be a girl armed with only a flashlight trying to rescue her girlfriend from ghosts that kidnapped her. We will probably delve in the story and characters in a later post, but for now this had to be settled to talk about the design of the power-ups. In Pac-Man there's a single power up, special pellets that allow you to eat the ghosts and disable them temporarily. To match the aesthetic choices, these power pellets will be represented as special batteries for your flashlight. The player's flashlight will start emitting more light and blink rapidly to show this newfound power once the battery is collected.
And that's mostly all of our progress. There's a lot of very technical documentation and detailed research about Pac-man's design and systems that has already been made by Hive-Heart too, but the game design documents are only available to Sonder and Hive-Heart for now (no non-disclosure agreement or anything, just very boring stuff not worth posting here)
Let's hope this goes well! We will try to post more about the characters and story soon.
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