Assignment 3 Proposal – Star Light

The scenario is, you get to control the stars.  Rearrange them into new constellations and forms to light up the night sky.  The problem, as time passes the development of the nearby city grows.  The light pollution from the metropolis is starting to hide the beautiful star light.  Can you convince the town to change their ways or will you loose your gift to societies “progress”.

The interactions at the start would be a sandbox of stars in the night sky.  The player can move them however they want.  To progress the game they would click on the tree and watch it grow showing time passing.  As time passes the city in the distance begins to encroach on your view of the sky.  Now the goal of the game is to some how arrange the stars to prevent the city from continuing to obstruct the sky and pollute the environment.  I could see three endings as of now, 1 The city takes over, failure, 2 the constellation is so beautiful the city notices it, success, 3 a specific arrangement of stars brings in an asteroid and destroys the city, radical.  Any advice on other scenarios or game mechanics would be appreciated.

The look of the game will shift as I figure things out.  The image above is a general layout test.

5 comments
  1. I think this is a really fun idea but I am not sure how you are going to program it so that city recognizes that something is beautiful. I feel like it would be a real hit or miss. Maybe there is a prophecy that the stars have to decipher so they make the specific designs for the results they want.

  2. You could probably do something interesting and physics-based with this too, based on how the gravity of the stars affect each other– accidentally get two stars too close and things go boom?

  3. You need to give the player some kind of idea of what is “beautiful” to the city, because beauty is quite subjective when it comes to random arrangements of stars. Other than that cool idea!

  4. I agree with the concerns of subjectivity about what is beautiful. Also will there be line drawing mechanics included with the star placing? I’m imagining a mess of stars that could look like a constellation to you, but not to anyone else without some guide lines connecting the dots. Otherwise, cute idea it just might be a bit ambitious.

  5. I think that the beginning sandbox would be a good warm-up for the player to learn how to control the stars, but I think that it is too subjective and too broad of a scope to have any arrangement the player comes up with affect the city. Maybe you could add subtle clues for particular orders that stars must be in to affect the city, such as in the wood grain of the tree, or in the grass, or maybe on the buildings themselves.

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