Game Idea Research - My mechanics for my educational game

 Following on from the game brainstorming session I did last week, this week I have decided to research one of my game ideas in greater detail.

The game I will be researching for this blog post is the math based platformer gamer. I have yet to come up with a title for this potential game but hopefully a few ideas will come to me while researching it today! 

As I mentioned in my last blog post, my initial concept of game mechanics for this game would be as stated below.

"Each level would consist of gaps and platforms to jump across. The playable character would have a number displayed above them that would update as you cross from platform to platform. The platforms that the player jumps to would also have numbers on them as well as a mathematic symbol such as plus, minus, multiply or divide. The player would also see the target number at the top left of their screen. There would also be a timer running for approx 5 seconds to add a sense of urgency to the game and if the timer runs out the player would lose the level."

 

The image above represents a similar layout that I would create for my math platformer game. Image available on Unity forums.

The game mechanic that I think would be the most important for making this game fun would be to have a countdown timer that updates based on the actions of the player. For example the game would begin and the player would have to jump to the next correct platform to solve the math problem within the remaining time. If the player makes it to the correct platform their countdown timer would increase giving them more time to get further and further into the level.

I feel as though this game mechanic will be easy enough to implement as it would just involve programming the timer to update on screen and also to link it to other parts of the game code, e.g. if the player jumps to the right platform they should gain some extra time. It is important to consider where to place the timer on screen however and i think this blog post from The Gamers Experience could be useful when deciding this. This tutorial from gamedevbeginner.com could come in handy for coding the timer in Unity. Obviously I will have to adapt it to my own game mechanics but it should help me understand the basics of how it works.

The next mechanic that will be crucial to making this game will be to vary the difficulty as the player progresses through the game. I want the game to be simple and easy to understand at first to draw the player in but after successfully passing a few platforms the math problems should get more difficult to solve within the remaining time. I plan on doing this by starting off with simple problems like 2+2 and progressing to more complex problems like 8*(10-1) for example. This tutorial for generating random numbers in C# should be useful for getting this in game functionality working.

My final game mechanic is something that I haven't mentioned in my last blog post but I think it could really make the game a lot more interesting. My idea to do this is to use in game power up items. For example if the player picked up a calculator power up item, the correct platforms for the next 3 to 5 jumps would be highlighted with a coloured beacon. There could also be unwanted objects such as a snail which would slow the movement of the player down so that they would be racing against the clock even more. I plan on using the following tutorial on creating power ups in Unity when developing my game to help with creating this game mechanic.

Overall after completing this extra research for my game idea I feel like I have a better idea of how to start developing for my project. While I am still a long way off from having a functioning game, I found this exercise very helpful in figuring out some aspects of how my game will look and feel to play. I am hoping that all the links I have included will be of use to me and maybe even be of use to you too!