eatingYOURbrain

I often say that time is just an illusion and since 2010 started, I found this statement quite surreal: days have been vanishing away.  It sounds scary because everyone loves to remind me I just turned 25 and time will keep going faster and tomorrow I’ll be old and rambling and I’ll be old and.. well, I’ll drink more coffee.

What truly matters is the discovery of a cheat for the said illusion, instead of learning AS 3.0 from lovely books and the all-knowingly-o-mighty-Internet, I stumbled onto flixel, and its promising tutorials of flourishing code and scripts I won’t have to type.  (Just because I am too stubborn to prototype in AS 2.0 and Coffee Break is a self-discipline technique to learn the–not so–new language of Flash.

Now that you, my faithful reader, are very impressed and curious, I am just going to use good old English and descriptively write down my game design prototype for Coffee Break.

The player interacts in game with the mouse, most likely represented by a hand, or a coffee pot.

She can left-click, drag and release.

The basic objective is to lead our main character, Frenchy the coffee bean from point A to B.  In this written example, he’ll start to the very left of the level and discover the basic game mechanics while traveling to the right end.

Frenchy is pretty grumpy and/or sleepy.  If you drag the coffee pot near him, he’ll just grab it, stealing the player’s cursor (and control in-game) and drink all the coffee before going nuts in some kind of way.  (I picture him running into a wall away from the player (Z depth — it’s almost game over but funny, at least the first time you see it.)

Coffee mugs are strategically placed throughout the level and the player must lure Frenchy by pouring coffee into them.

Depending on the kind of coffee, the size of the mugs and other variable to be determined, a delicious aroma teases Frenchy who zombily-walks to them and ravenously empties them.

Over time, the once perfectly warm coffee cools down and its sweet scent vanishes.  Frenchy stops.

I want to experiment with the player’s cursor as a hand, so the player gets to actually make the coffee, maybe as a mini-game, or a sort of puzzle based challenge.  If that turns out to be boring or disconnecting the experience from the characters, the cursor-coffee-pot still needs a source of coffee, its own the fountain of life.

Therefore, the coffee pot has a meter, quantifying the amount of coffee, its freshness and all that jazz.

The pouring mechanic is simply using Pythagoras’s formula.