A Shifty Element

When you look at how the game works, you will quickly see that the game is a fairly simple memory game. Well, perhaps simple is the wrong term to use, as actually remembering a ten digit sequence is a challenge. At least if you play the game properly it is. Certainly, if you were to write down the correct rooms on a piece of scrap paper, the game would be extremely simple to complete, but you would be missing the point of playing the game.

This leads to question of how to make the game more challenging. While just having the main game mode would probably be enough for the game, adding a twist or two to a fairly traditional game is always a good idea. So I started thinking about some of the other games I have done and remembered my rotation puzzle game. In this game a picture is broken into squares and scrambled by shifting the squares. The picture is re-assembled by shifting rows or columns of the picture until the picture has been restored.

Doing the same things with rooms would essentially change the sequence mid-stream and would really work the brain. Obviously, it would not be fair to the player to have them enter a room and have the door in a different place so some mechanism needs to be created to show the player that the doors have shifted locations. By having a LCD display over the room, you could not only indicate if the doors have shifted, but you could also use the LCD to display the room number of the room the player is currently in. Which leads to a third play mode option.