I seem to have a thing for developing domino games, and this is an idea I came up with some time ago which I finally brought to life.
Domino Arena is a multiplayer, fast-paced competitive puzzle game where you try to paint a playfield full of dominoes with your player's color, and prevent other players from doing the same. Every level contains an intricate path of dominoes that can fall and then stand up again. Each time a domino is knocked over, its color becomes that of the domino that knocked it over. In the path are several "junctions" where one domino can knock over more than one. Your goal is to make the junctions let dominoes of your colors go through, and block dominoes with other players' colors from getting through.
I'm also planning on introducing random boosters to help or hinder players:
- Shortened cooldowns for a temporary period
- Faster domino falling
- Painting / free colorization of a region of dominoes
- Enemies - Lengthened cooldowns for a temporary period
- Enemies - Slower domino falling
- Enemies - Visual obstructions on the screen (blurriness, or other creative distorting shaders)
- Destruction of a region of dominoes (nuke)
Right now the project is in a very early prototyping phase; I'm still unsure if I'm going to follow it through to completion given my other commitments to help other game developers with their projects in the coming weeks.
There are many things I still need to think through:
- Is it a viable game that people would actually play, even if for just a few rounds?
- I could probably get this done even with network play in just a few months. I normally prefer to release larger games than this; but why not just take it easy and release something that may not even get more than a few hours of play for once?
- How fast can the dominoes fall before casual players lose track of whats going on?
- Should junctions ever have more than two dominoes?
- What "boosters" should I have in it?
- What should the player limit be?
- How should I do the art and music design?
- What makes for a good level design?
- How should the AI work?
I think the next step is to introduce the multi-player components, clean up the existing assets, maybe make one more level with some boosters, and put a beta out there.
And my projects!
Interesting concept. Tracking this one to keep an eye on it!
Looks very cool. I would love to see some of the more 'complex' dominoe effects, like swinging across a bridge (takes longer to retrigger/go back to start?) and going up/down ramps.
Maybe you could add weird ones, like a bungee jump or something. Looks hard to track after awhile, but I liked how you could get multiple 'waves' all in action