I'm working on a little design right now and just wanted to bounce my idea on some people; so read on and if you could give me a few opinions on my ideas that'd be rad !!!

The basic premise of the game is you play as a little rabbit-alien-dude going through a series of simple platformer levels. The level design is pretty plain, just going over hazards and (possibly) falling on enemies to defeat them.

The main gameplay element is that the whole screen will be completely dark aside from the protagonist. You will be able to see the main character's face, and using the expressions to tell what you should do. Based on if the little guy looks up excited (jump up) or makes a scared expression (jump over the hazard), you make an action that matches the expression.

In order to preserve the dark atmosphere, I'm leaning towards not having a HUD and instead displaying life and power ups through the crown that the main character wears. There will be effectively an infinite amount of lives (as I expect the player to make plenty of mistakes since the gameplay is kinda difficult), however once your crown breaks you will be sent back to the last checkpoint. This leaves some room for error from the player.

So far I've designed the protagonist and the antagonist, and I'm gonna start working on the level design once school is out for summer.

Thank you for reading my little idea! Opinions?

1 hour ago, jbadams said:

Sounds interesting, you'll need to make sure the player character is very expressive to not frustrate the player though!

I assume you could see just a little bit around the character so you can see what you're dodging, or would you be shown what happened after you die?

Yes, I will have a small area around the character that is visible as well as possibly a small light trail that displays where you last died so you don't repeat your last mistake. Thank you for your input!

Make sure that you have something to incentivize the player to keep moving (i.e. a level timer that counts down) or something else to make sure that the player isn't just moving really slow and waiting for the creature to make an expression.  Sounds like it could be fun though!