Reset Buttons

Lots of games have them and apparently so does my project.Talking with Richard today completely flipped my project on its head, in the best of ways. Although I was enjoying the fluidity of the traversal mechanics in my original concept, I felt the game was lacking something that was allowing me to get truly motivated about it. We were originally talking about Audiosurf and Bit Trip Runner which led on to where I'm at now;

Pretty much I've changed my game to a reverse auto-runner type game where the player would be running towards the screen the whole time and can swap between six lanes to collect items and dodge hazards. The six lanes would be cycling around like a hexagon and the camera would slowly rotate, speeding up as the player increases their score. The controls would be simple; jump, skip to left-hand lane, skip to right-hand lane, skip to lane directly above you. The player would be running through this infinite tunnel away from various cores, such as a burning furnace, grinding engine or void. They could still play as a tree spirit and extract the souls from wood they pass through to keep the level of abstraction present, but the tiers of the world concept no longer applies. Instead there would be a fuel meter or something that keeps the level's core engine burning so the more items they collect from the lanes the less fuel is able to be replenished and the player would complete a level once the fuel meter reaches zero and the core burns out. For my presentation I am thinking of combining an interactive processing sketch to explain the rotating world and a Stencyl iteration of the treadmill runner style to show the pacing.

These are two examples of how the player could navigate the six lanes. The first strip shows the player (the red dot) moving right to the adjacent lane. This would be accomplished by a simple press of the "right" arrow key, likewise with the "left" arrow key and moving to the left adjacent lane. The second strip portrays the player leaping from their current lane to the lane directly opposite them. This would be performed by pressing the "space bar" key, as the "up" arrow key would be used for an on-lane jump.
Things to keep in mind as far as controls are concerned is the left and right buttons would be oriented relative to the character's starting position which would be the bottom of the screen. This means "left" more accurately moves the player clockwise, "right" anticlockwise.