The next lens I want to look through on our game "All Fucked Up" is the lens of surprise from the book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses written by Jesse Schell. I try to answer the following three questions:
- What will surprise the players playing "All Fucked Up"?
- Does the story have surprises? The mechanics? The artwork?
- Does the mechanics give the player ways to surprise themselves?
Quite though to answer this for your own game. I give it a try and might be completely wrong. But at least it is documented. We placed cute funny animations that get played if you achieve a goal like kill two soldiers in a row which makes the character laugh. The artwork is not breathtaking to be honest, but what might be surprising is that every gun feels different. The gun itself is not visualized instead we focus on shell ejection, kickback on the characters (gun impacts the player, bullets provide kickback on the objects they hit).
I plan to have time limited levels as well, where everything explodes if you don’t make it in time. The time goes backward in those levels.
Improvements I can think of
- Use the gun kickback to achieve something
- Add a shootable grappling hook to climb up unreachable spots
- Add defuse abilities
- Compose weapons out of parts
- Destroy locks or start a chain reaction on explosives
I think this is an important part and I will have to think more about it and collect more ideas.
Thanks for reading. I would appreciate your oppinion below in the comment section.
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