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Traps Ahoy

Having an animated version featuring trapped doors sounds like a good idea. The problem is that traps are needed. How many? Well the combination game had ten different numbers, so why not have ten different rooms. Each room would have X number of doors (five ended up being what fit when I drew the door so that ended up being the number of doors). The traps should be cartoon like as younger people do occasionally come to my site.

The first trap that comes to my mind, perhaps because of the Lord of the Rings movies, is a spider. The player gets trapped in a web and a giant spider rushes towards the player. Of course, in the final version, I didn’t have time to draw and animate a spider, but drawing a web is not too difficult.

The second trap also comes from the movies, but this time it is a variety of horror movies. The trap is the swinging axe. This can simply be an axe swinging back and forth. As the player is not shown being cut up, the sequence is not offensive, yet the idea of being chopped up by an axe is certainly a way of dying that I would not want to face. As players of the game know, this trap ended up in the game pretty much as I envisioned it.

James Bond inspired my third trap. In the movie Goldfinger, James is tied up to a table while an industrial laser cuts the gold table he is strapped to in half. A laser beam moving back and forth would be too much like the axe, so instead, I opted for a pattern of lasers.

One of the last ideas I thought of came next. Originally, I was thinking of bees. The problem is that unless the player is allergic to bees, they don’t seem too dangerous. The one thing I don’t like about bees is being stung. Stinging reminds me of darts. While darts are not overly dangerous by themselves, for some reason when I think of darts I think of poison. While most people probably don’t associate darts with poisoning, darts by themselves are dangerous enough to make a trap. And as you see in the game, darts flying by the player do get a point across.

When I was still in school, my class took a field trip to Barkerville. While that may not have much to do with programming games, it has a lot to do with the next trap. You see, in one of the houses there was a curtain covering a doorway. Somebody in our class asked what was beyond the curtain. The guide asked us what we thought was behind the curtain. A lot of people made guesses, but I really didn’t care because I knew the guide would tell us soon enough. And sure enough, after a few guesses the guide smiled and pulled back the curtain to reveal...a wall. I instantly went from not really caring to insanely interested in the logic behind this. The logic was that it made the rather small house look much larger because there appeared to be additional rooms. So, the idea of a door leading to a wall was an obvious choice. Besides, this would be very easy to implement, and when you have a short schedule, simplicity is always appreciated.

While we are on the topic of simplicity, what more could be simpler than to re-purpose work that was done on another project. As visitors to the site probably have already noticed, there is a lot of material on the site. One of the games on my site, Wilmag’s Lab, has a really nice fire effect. That fire could easily be added to the game. So the logic behind the fire trap, which is an ideal trap, is that I already have the animation to do it. When creating a game, it is always wise to take advantage of what you already have. Though do try to have original material in the game, as using the same stuff too much causes it to loose it’s effectiveness.

Another common trap, one that simply had to be included, is the bottomless pit. My original vision for this trap was that I would have the hole appear and then show the camera view of a person falling into the hole, concluded by a looping animation of rocky terrain going past the player. I settled for just showing the hole.

The next trap is actually one of the first ones that I thought of. I really don’t know how I came up with this one, though I suspect Monty Python has something to do with it. The words “pointy sticks” came to my mind. Granted, spears are essentially pointy sticks and they are quite common in games.

The second to last trap is the electricity trap. Electricity is a very common element of horror movies, and was used to bring Frankenstein’s monster to life. A stream of electricity is what I want for this effect, and the results in the final game look pretty good (especially when you take into account how long it took me to animate that effect).

The final trap is my personal favourite trap. What I like to think of as the cartoon trap, even though today’s Saturday morning cartoons seem to rely on scores of strange monsters and robots rather than on the more classical slap stick humour that I enjoy. In this trap a large anvil falls from the sky causing the ground to shake. This turned out pretty good in the game, so try to choose the wrong final door as this loss is worth it.

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