Bodiless design doc
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Bodiless Design Doc
Game Mechanics
Bodiless is a platformer game starring character who lost his body (or more precisely torso) leaving him with only head, hands and legs. Game mecahnics largely revolve around exploiting these bodyparts by different ways when platforming.
Twist is that player can use any part of character’s body for platforming. In practice this means that character can walk and hang from platforms with his head, hands and feet. You can get good image of the mechanic from this Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eae0A0a-VqE
Player has to figure out how to eploit character’s body to overcome dangers and puzzles of levels. Usually player encounters somekind puzzles which need clever using of the body to be able to proceed.
Player character has also infinite lives but is very vulnerable. Basically single hit from any enemy or dangerous object ”kills” him returning him to the last checkpoint he touched. This means that difficulty is rather hard, but after each obstacle is another checkpoint. Point is to try to create ”one more time” hook for the player with fast retrying after failed attempt. There may also be timer which records player’s time through level with possibly online higscore table. That’s not decided yet though and is pretty low on priority list. Level difficulty is created by obstacles which need good timing and some planning before action. Often obstacles could involve three stages:
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Examine the obstacle and plan your action
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Time your action
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Execute the action
This means that while fast moving and action is required to survive, surviving also needs some examining of the situation rather than delving straightly into it.
Goal of each level is to get in to exit. Additionally there may be some collectable stuff like different body parts of you like heart, liver etc. Which you can optionally collect. These objects are behind extremely hazardous parts of the levels. By collecting every of them player can unlock different ending or/and some extra stuff.
Theme and basic story
Game’s theme is not yet finally decided though there is one strong candidate:
Game starts from strange freak show performance where the magician asks for a volunteer for his spectacle. Player’s character ends up to be this volunteer. In spectacle the magician announces that he will remove/hide the volunteer’s body with his magical box and indeed does so while transforming player character’s face a bit ugly. After this show ends. Later character wakes up in somekind cage where there is other ”freaks” and learns that magician tours from town to town and occasionally kidnaps volunteers for his show by transforming them into different freaks. In the next stop the show has a new spectacle ”A amazing man with no body” where this man (player) is set into hazardous survival scene in front of the audience. Audience of course thinks it’s just optical illusion while in reality all spikes and sledge hammers etc. are true. Story would be rather simple, consisted from short cutscenes where freaks plan a revenge for the magician and in the end manage to catch him and stuff him into his box and transform him to whatever creature. After that they cure themselves and destroy the box. Now it’s also important to note that magician himself doesn’t have any magical powers. Only his box which he made from his grandpa’s coffin has strange power to change humans. Magician himself is just very sneaky and evil human with not much talent in to magic tricks. Actually one of his freaks is forced to build all mechanics and complex props for his shows.
So game’s graphical theme would somekind little scruffy and dark freak show setting where level graphics hint to the theaterical props. Many enemies and backgrounds of the levels would involve mechanical objects with gears and cogs. For example moving platforms would move in rails with cogs and ”walking” man with sledge hammer would be just a prop with swinging sledge hammer while the man is moved by somekind mecahnical machine. Occasionally there would be some other freaks against you who have gotten lunatic and bloodthirsty under the curse of the magical box and lost their humanity. In each level (or almost each) there would be different theme where the props would be different. For example ”An amazing man with no body – Adventure in grim castle” spectacle would have castle themed backgrounds and props and so on.
Along with this theme, possible other themes would be:
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Robotic character adventuring in a scifi environment.
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Character adventuring in somekind spirit world with surreal environments.
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Dead character in border of life and death. Grimreaper was just transmitting his soul to the afterlife when he got a bisness meeting and left player character halfly transmitted. Player escapes to find his lost soul and either return to life or transfer fully to the afterlife.
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Player is skeleton or mummy whose body and treasures graverobbers stole and tries to catch them. However, while living he ordered to build so many traps for his pyramid/tomb that they are more harmful than helpful in tracking the thieves.
These themes are still in my mind though for now I’m designing the freak show theme more precisely.
Milestones and planned order of development
Here is rather vague plan of creation process and important components the game will need to be made:
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Level editor. Pretty much complete except minor adjustments still required.
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Deciding the game theme and graphical style. Currently on way.
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Making the actual graphics for basic structures of the game.
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Designing first levels and making them.
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Creating basic UI and title screen etc.
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Feedback release.
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Repeat 3 and 4 and adding more details and polishing.
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Polishing the game and adding every extra stuff.
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Testing
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Release.
Note that this list is far from definite list and order of the things anc includes only the most basic components and stages of the creation process.
End
This doc is made 19.6.2010. Estimated and coveted deadline of the final game is this summer, meaning that game is aimed for now to be complete in August or September 2010. Details and plans may and probably do change during the process (deadline too) so this document is probably going to be modified in the future.
Along with devlogs I might write some other stuff here but that is unprobable since my time is nowadays a bt more limited than years ago. However, if everything goes well and I can get used to this outdated software and write some stuff here should appear something. Looking at the site’s stats I’m bit suprised that here is still some traffic going on though small, so I guess at least people or two notice that something has changed, haha 
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