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On a flight to cold, dark Scandinavia recently, I was thinking about how one of the delights of Peggle – other than its ridiculous addictiveness – was the rich, interesting backdrops that the levels are built around.
They’re used in all of the editions of Peggle – most notably in the free Peggle Extreme that was distributed with the Orange Box by Valve, which had a range of screenshots from the various games included in the bundle. Here’s an example:
It occurred to me that this was odd for two reasons. Firstly, this was a game highlighting its backgrounds, rather than hiding them away in the, er, background. Would Peggle be as great without its insane backdrops? No way.
Secondly, it’s odd because this is a rare example of art purposefully having an effect on the mechanics of the game. Mostly, in game development, the level designers tell the art team what to do. This was the other way around.
So I thought about what would make a good backdrop for a game and, in the same manner as a kid playing “I Spy” picking the car that he’s sat in, decided that a plane window would be the perfect venue for a calming puzzle game.
Perhaps it’d be a game where you had to connect up droplets of water, ice crystals or even clouds to make patterns. Of those, I’m a biggest fan of the second one – the patterns formed by some of those ice crystals can be beautiful.
The tutorial could be a view out onto an airport tarmac, while waiting for the plane to take off, complete with instructions from the captain over the PA system.
“This is your captain speaking… uh… please connect up the crystals so they form a line… uh… and make sure that your seat back and tray table are in an upright position”.
It’d be easy to repurpose the kind of design you find on airplane safety cards into a set of menus and instruction windows, if voice isn’t an option. I’m not convinced that text could convey the awesome distorted sound that an audio recording would.
If you like the idea, and you have the knowhow to create something good, go ahead and make a game out of it. Then send me a link – I’d love to see what you’ve done with it.