Quest For The Golden Idol
Quest For The Golden Idol is an exploration game where the player searches through a dark Mayan temple looking for and titular prize.
Problem
Take a previously designed board game and translate it into a video game prototype.
Role
Lead Game Designer, Level Designer, Programmer
Process
The idea began as a board game myself and some of the team had created previously working remotely with Tabletop Simulator due to COVID. The aim of the project was to create a game with a sense of suspense. We drew inspiration from games like Betrayal At House on the Hill, Zombies!, and the roguelike videogame genre.
Called Golden Temple, it is a cooperative game where three players explore a temple that was created by drawing from a deck of map tiles. This was to give an air of mystery so the players didn’t know what lay ahead for them. Depending on the type of tile the player moved to they would draw a card from either the Event, Trap, or Treasure Decks. They would continue to explore the Temple till they achieved an objective, also drawn at random. This would ensure each game was unique.
Naturally, the drawback was that this game required a time commitment to both grasp the more complex rules as well as finish the objective. We felt this was potentially a perfect game to covert to a videogame due to the ability to offload some elements to scripting.
To start the process of transforming the board game into a video game, I created a mind map to help us scope the project. This helped us create a clear picture of what mechanics and assets we might want.
We were fortunate enough to find the Mayan Temple Pack from Dungeon Crawler Master in the Unity.
This allowed us to skip greyboxing as we were working on a tight schedule. The provides assets and prefabs required extensive cleanup on our part to make them usable as they lacked colliders and had unnecessary components, but once cleaned up helped make a proof of concept that conveyed the connotative feel of our game and its enviroment.
Gameplay
To keep the suspenseful feel, the entire level was dark and the player would go around with a torch lighting lanterns on the walls to help reveal the temple as they made their way through the labyrinth. This would also allow the player to know what areas they had already been to.
While initially, we wanted to create procedurally generated levels, we came up against the time constraints of our final deadline and myself being the only one with Unity scripting experience on our team. We decided to make our proof of concept a fully fleshed-out level that demonstrated the other mechanics of the game.
Items for Collection
The player must find their way to the second floor to discover a key to open a locked door.
This door will unlock if the player has found the key item.
There are details throughout to add to the suspenseful feel.
The player must unlock a door, find their way through the darken labyrinth and avoid the pitfalls to make it to this room where they can open the secret door to the Idol Room.