Steam Lacing, Part I

While I was working as a game programmer on Fable III and trying to get into a design position, there was at one point some discussion of the need for a new mini-game. All the other mini-games had already been designed by the Simulation Designer. Because I had made it clear that I was interested in moving towards the design discipline and as this new mini game was to be for a system that was still only hypothetical, I was offered the opportunity to show off my design chops by proposing a design for this mini game.

I jumped at the chance.

Because this was partially intended as an opportunity for me to display my abilities as a designer, I kept careful notes of my design process, which ultimately followed the path of experimental prototyping. The system that the mini-game was dependent on was eventually dropped from Fable III and I did eventually get the gig as a designer, but I decided to continue with the carefully documented design process, at first as a possible bid for my dissertation and later just because I’d already put so much work into it. I’m still working on it now, though I’m really not sure where it is going. I have some ideas, but to share them now would be getting ahead of myself. First I want to share where I’ve come from.

The very first step in this project was writing down several proposals for different mini-game ideas that I felt could fill the role required. While I was happy to prototype any or all of these games, in the end I only created prototypes for one. What follows is the original proposal for this mini-game.

The Proposal
This mini-game is a cross between ‘the black box game’ and any block matching game. The game is played across a grid of spaces, each of which is always filled with an object. These objects are made up of the following:

• Gems: These come in both coloured and clear varieties. There is at most one gem of any given colour, but there can be many clear gems.
  
• Sand: A grain of sand.
  
• Impurity: A speck of something that isn’t a gem or a grain of sand.

Part way down the grid is a horizontal line crossing it. The object of the game is to have all coloured gems and no Impurities bellow this horizontal line. To do this, the player shoots a jet of steam along any row from the left side. This jet of steam destroys all sand and impurities in its path. However, it is affected by gems in the following ways:

• If the jet encounters a gem ‘head on’ it pops the gem out of the grid (the gem is not destroyed). The jet doesn’t continue past this point. This does not happen to gems that are ‘waiting’ along the top and thus are off of the grid.
  
• If the jet passes near a gem the jet of steam is deflected away from it in the same way that rays are reflected in the black box game.

Once the objects in spaces have been destroyed or removed, if a gem was popped from the grid it is placed along the top of the grid, ready to fall in. Then the objects above the cleared spaces fall into them in the same way as in a standard block matching game. When objects fall into the grid from the top, gems will fall from where they’ve been visibly laid. Otherwise new Sand and Impurities will be randomly generated to fall in (given a set ratio).

The space around the grid is presented as some sort of steam punk contraption, full of gears and hoses. The point at which the steam will be shot from on the left is the nozzle of a hose that can be moved up and down. The gems pulse with energy and the steam looks fast and hot.