Work on the physball 0.5 game goes at a steady pace, but I’m not sure how much of it I can get to a presentatble state before the exam. That is just a week away after all.
Elbereth has yet again been a great help in developing teh required script for teh game, but as I’m building more tiles for teh obstacle course I’m second-guessing my design motivations. The structures I have now might be interesting challenges, but are quite bland geometric shapes. It doesn’t look all that exciting.
Then sudenly I realized what had been the allure in the original physBall game. The fun part was working with the actual world as the playing field. Now that’s gone there’s nothing left but a run-of-the-mill puzzle game, and a frustrating one at that.
That’s why I’ve been thinking of incorporating the Second Life landscape into the game again. The obstacle course is tile-based, the SL grid is too. It could be quite funny to recreate teh tiles in the image of famous SL locations, like Luskwood, Caledon, Sheep Tower, Club BadGirls and other places. It would increase the visual aesthetics and the connectedness with the world, but it might deteriorate teh clearness of the obstacles.
As a stepping stone to full-scale physBall it might be the best solution to draw the connection though.
Wait… I’m just thinking of something. What if the game board and the world are actually the same. If the ball moves into an area on the board, a corresponding ball would move in the actual world. Now that could casue some mayhem. Especially as the unsuspecting players don’t know what they’re doing.
