So much for regular updates!
Anyway, where are we…
Err… nothing on the screen yet, but the design’s been thrashed out a bit better, so let’s go over that.
In Little Quirks you play a Wizard, gazing into your Crystal Ball, and guiding the Little Quirks around the land to keep them being eaten, squished, burnt, splattered, or otherwise mangled. Your energy can be used to remodel the ground, or it can be used to build contraptions and traps.
Contraptions directly help the Quirks, and you activate them by touching them, whereas Traps are more for keeping other beasties at bay – but won’t differentiate between Quirk or baddie so you have to be wary of them.
This can give multiple ways of completing a level – you either use all your energy to remodel the land as best you can to help them, or you create contraptions to manually shunt them about the place. There’s a clue there in what you do with the contraptions – you can manipulate them. So, for example, with a catapult contraption, it won’t activate till you touch it, so you can be rather selective in what you use it to fling – be it a Quirk, or something else! It also gives you a bit more interactivity than just setting out the world to play while you watch the Quirks go from A->B.
Of course, as I’ve mentioned, there’s a strong nod to Lemmings. In fact, Quirks has a bigger nod to Lemmings than it’s bigger brother Tiny Critters does. Tiny Critters is more influenced by the rather stunning Lemmings-clone, Troddlers, one of my favourite games that came after the Lemmings phenomenon. But one major point in which both games differ from Lemmings is there is no direct control over the creatures themselves. Quirks has you creating traps and contraptions, as well as manipulating land and contraptions ( but not traps! which will operate themselves. ) Critters gives you an actual character in the game world – much like Troddlers – where again, you influence the direction of the creatures in the world by magic walls and directional arrows, but don’t really directly control what they do like in Lemmings where you give them unique jobs.
Anyway, next time, I’m hoping to have something on the screen.. while I doubt I’ll get much done in the twelve days remaining ( especially seeing as next weekend is effectively taken again, ) I’ll give it my best shot. I’ve still got to implement physics ( going with Box2D, ) audio ( OpenAL, ) and support more than just Linux.
