Game Idea: Quantum On The High Seas

Posted on 8th April 2013 by PTSnoop in Games

islands

This month’s Game Prototype Challenge has been announced, the themes are Entanglement and Islands. So, crazy person that I am, I’ve decided to make a game about desert island resource management and quantum polarisation mechanics.

You have a group of islands, which produce eight different resource “particles”: fire, wood, bananas, rum, plants, anti-wood, anti-bananas and anti-rum. Opposites (such as bananas and anti-bananas) annihilate when brought into contact, getting you extra points and some more time on the clock. Your task is to keep the islands particle-free.

To mix things up a bit, some islands will have Polariser buildings. If you bring rum to a rum/anti-rum building, the rum will stay the same; if you bring wood to a rum/anti-rum building, nothing will happen, because rum/anti-rum and wood/anti-wood are at right-angles to each other on the wheel. But if you bring bananas to a rum/anti-rum building, then because bananas are close to rum, then 75% of the time the bananas will turn into rum. The remaining 25% of the time, they’ll turn into anti-rum. Are you keeping up with all this?

Now, to properly bring in the Entanglement theme, you’ll sometimes see boats bringing pairs of entangled white particles. These particles are in a quantum state where they’ve not decided what they are yet – if you bring one these to your rum/anti-rum building, one will become rum. The other one, regardless of where it is, will instantly become anti-rum.

I’m hoping all this will make more sense when you’re actually playing. Now the only thing I’m wondering is, what should I use to make this game? I was meaning to have a look at Cocos2d-X or haXe-nme to make this month’s game, but I’m not sure I’ll have enough time between now and the end of the week to make this pretty-complex game *and* learn a new framework. Should I just stick with what I know and use Love2D? My mental picture of this game has a touchscreen, but I’m not sure how well it would actually work without a tablet-sized one, and I don’t have a tablet… Hmm.

One Comment

  1. go for LÖVE or corona, both lua and if you keep the graphic stuff abstract enough you could release on either.

    And I hate anti-rum, it makes me cry :´(

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