Botward Situations

One of the first games I ever worked on stemmed from a game jam hosted by my school. The theme was “getting out of an awkward situation”, so we created a game about a robot with a set of abilities, some of which became disabled when they entered certain areas, for example being forced to use their jetpack for a reduced period of time due to a fuel shortage in one area, not being able to pick things up in an area so cold that it froze their electronics, and not being able to fire in an area filled with civilians. The game had a secondary objective of stealth, the robot couldn’t let his enemies see that he was unable to do certain tasks lest they take advantage of the weakness on this supposedly state of the art robot. What we landed on, and what we submitted to our school’s Game Expo, ended up being mostly a prototype, a proof of concept where all you had to do was solve the simple puzzles to get the MacGuffin to the end of the level. The goal for the game we never got to make was for it to be a combat focused puzzle game, where the player would complete objectives and take out enemies without having the enemies realize the robot’s deficiencies.