Tuesday 29 March 2011

Animal Frenzy: Reward System

    After our weekly meeting today we decided that our game was lacking some form of reward system. Before today players would simply place animals in the right place with an infinite amount of attempts to do so until they progressed to the next level. However to introduce a difficulty curve we've iterated the mechanic so that players now only have a set amount of attempts to get the right animals. Players who pick the right animals with few or no incorrect answers will be rewarded with medals, which is the reward system we have decided to introduce. We haven't quite decided whether the medals gained during each level will be cumulated and averaged out at the very end of the game to give a final gold, silver or bronze medal or whether players will aim simply to acquire the best medals they can.

    Either way we needed medals, so we came up with the idea of animal themed medals. A platinum Eagle, gold Lion, silver Elephant and bronze Blob Fish, however the Blob Fish may be changed to just an ordinary fish. So here are the medals I've bashed out this evening for this purpose.


[ Click image to enlarge ]

...A continuation from the medals, I then created boxes for the medals to sit in so that they could popup on the screen when earned:



2 comments:

  1. Very nice... the fish looks so sad... makes you strive to get better than a bronze :)

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  2. It really sounds interesting, although I have some comments: first, I think you should award the medals at the end of each level, allowing the player to replay the level to get a better medal, not just replay the whole game.

    There is one thing that just popped in my mind though: maybe making the medals with different animals isn't that great an idea. Think of all the reward-based games you've played. The medals were always almost identical in design. The problem is that I, as a player, would like to see all the designs, so maybe I would be more encouraged to fluke a level only so that I'd get to see what the fish one looks like. Why not let all the medals have the same animal, only the colors be different? Or, make medals for each level with a different animal. Like lvl 1 gets fish, lvl 2 gets lion and so on. And at the end of the game, I'd see all the animals, only colored different, rather than just different animals for how good I did.

    But that's just my opinion. Hope it helped.

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