Making Mischief - Coming up with ways of causing trouble

We've all seen them--the meme videos of Raccoons in the garbage can, stealing cat food, and doing anything they can to get food, not caring one iota about any trouble they cause.

That it. That's the idea, the essence, I'm wanting to build into this game.

Causing trouble is what this game is about. So this week I was focused on building out the mischief system. The idea is you go about causing trouble. As you do so you get points. And causing chain reactions gets you even more points.

Mischief Doors

At the basic level, mischief points will unlock doors. Different doors have different point requirements so you're never done causing trouble.

I'm still brainstorming other ways to employ mischief points, but opening doors is a good initial utilization of the mechanic.

Cars

The mischief needs to have a detrimental effect on somebody. For the introductory level, which takes place in a city, I have a busy street with cars zooming by. You can both get run over by the cars and deal out sweet payback.

I won't give away all the ways and details on how you can make trouble for the cars, but here are a few things.

Light Programming

There will be several places throughout the game where you can reprogram a computer or lights. Once you figure out how to access the traffic signal controller, then you can reprogram the traffic lights.

Of course the cars follow the traffic signals. So set it to red and make them stop, making it easier for you to cross the road without become roadkill. Or set it to green and try to time it just right so cars crash and score some extra mischief points.

Effects

I've spent a lot of time this week improving the look with better effects. I have been using basic placeholder effects, but I did make a few that I feel like they look pretty good.

... Explosion!

You can also tamper with a fire hydrant, flooding the road with water. That's sure to mess up some of the cars.

Interaction

One of the systems I developed that has really made it easy to build out level functionality is my interaction/trigger system. The point of this system is to manage cause and effects of the player in the world. It's really easy to combine them to add any sort of interactivity. For example:

• When you enter a room, start playing certain music
• When you place a key in a keyhole, open a door
• When you cross a threshold, trigger a cinematic sequence, that triggers dialog when finished, that triggers a goal update when finished

There's still more ways I want the player to be able to interact with the world. I'm thinking of adding the ability to do a tail swipe that can break certain objects.