Inspiration and where it comes from.

While thinking about Hunt the Wumpus redesining one way or another I was inspired by couple of things.

Firs of all it was recently seen movie Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.
I liked the idea that those small and creepy creatures which populated the house where actually Tooth fairies. It made me think about different faces of folk lore so beloved fairies. Although I didn't made fairies scary of creepy in my version of the Wumpus but they're still a bit different more satirical than normal.

Second block of inspiration came from good ol' game called Neighbours From Hell. I've done a bit of a rip off but hey.. They like to call that thing an inspiration! And the method of odd perspective seems to work for my idea pretty well.

I've wanted the game to have a bit similar colour mood and feel as seen on beautiful game called Stacking.

And the last thing that continuously hounted my memories is old Russian point and click game about detective and his sidekick. Brother Pilots it's called.

I guess that's it.

My sell sheet and how it feels.

That's my very first idea about transforming Hunt the Wumpus into some sort of Cave creatures photography hunt game.

And that's where it all started. To be honest I'm tired of my concept now and I've noticed some serious gaps in game design but I'm going with it till the end. There was a time when I was about to scrap everything and start over again. And I've almost did that but after some serious thinking I've decided to stick with it.

About this stage I've started developing characters. I've tried painting plain black silhouettes. Sometimes it gets fun but all in all that doesn't work for me. Pen and pencil seems like staying for a long time in my working routine. Because it's not only about the form I like to develop. I like to come with everything at the same time. First there's some cloudy cloud figure then there comes silhouette and finally inside. If I like it I may colour it and from that stage I'm moving on further.

Wumpus

Looks like that guy Wumpus was pretty busy some time ago.
There's couple of Magic the Gathering cards named after it: Hunted Wumpus and Shivan Wumpus. Also remember Wampa? The beast which almost chewed Luke Skywalker in episode IV. I wonder how many dogs in the whole world where named after Wump.. something?

But somehow I've decided that I don't want to show how does my Wumpus looks like. Partly because I have a freedom of designing the game in the way I want. I just love that taste of mystery and even a bit of frustration when You as a player don't know something and there's no real way to find it out. It gives some more space for  imagination and some depth to the game world since not everything is handed for you on a silver plate after some time.

In some way I just wanted to go indie all the way. I want the project to be believable and really possible to accomplish but I know that it's not going to be finished. To be honest I don't really like some game design decisions I've made but it's just not worth changing something to much.

And I've really learned something so it made my time worthy.

I've found that the most annoying part is that I'm unable to test the game idea properly. I mean there's no time to build or to learn how to build a working prototype. And board game style testing just isn't working... 

Prototyping..