It all started with this single page of drawings. In my head I had an idea, I wanted to make a puzzle game that was based on logical problem solving rather than random clicking. I wanted it to be of a sci-fi genre, but with a root in reality.
I had seen videos on youtube showing magnetic levitation which I found really interesting. I wanted to include an element of this into my game, so I came up with the concept of a mysterious sphere which would levitate once the magnetic coils beneath it were activate and a super cooled substance was put inside the sphere. I then thought about more elements which would be included to make this an escape game (a levitating sphere is pretty cool but it isn't going to help you get out of a room with no door!).
One of the themes of the game that I had clearly in my head at the start is to make the player start to question what is going on around them. Why does this room have no door? What is up with this strange sphere? Where are all the people? I wanted to achieve some of this with the way the room is designed. The walls are bare, very stark, almost bleached as if deserted for a long time. A crack in the wall, and flickering lights also help to build upon this impression. I also wanted the game to be quite dream-like, placing crazy alien technology right next to something ordinary like a kettle.
As to the issue of no door, I decided I liked the idea of the sphere itself being the key to the whole game, and didn't want to do anything strange like have a door hidden behind some wallpaper or anything. I remembered how in the film terminator, when objects from the future were sent back, they would destroy all objects around them in a perfect sphere, I thought that something similar would be quite a unique and interesting way to escape the room.
I wanted the sphere to evolve throughout the game, starting off as a simple object on the floor, and revealing itself to be an advanced piece of technology. I originally intended to put in a huge fleshy, biomechanical H.R Geiger-esque head on the robot, however I later simplified it down to something easier to animate.
I hadn't decided a lot of the final elements of the game yet, the sphere was originally going to have a button which appeared on the top once all the elements of the puzzle were completed, which activated the final “weapon” to create the game's exit. This was later replaced by the remote, which solved a lot of the problems of how to activate each phase of the sphere's evolution.
Once I had come up with the main concept, I needed to try to flesh out the rest of the game. I wrote down every step that would be needed to complete the game, to see where I could add new puzzle elements, or move things around.
Thinking about these elements helped me come up with some of the more distinctive parts of the puzzle. The concept of “energy cores”, which could store heat or cold energy from hot or cold objects, led to the need for something hot, something cold, and a machine which would be used to make the transfers. Hence the Enertron was born. The name 'Enertron' is basically a contraction of 'Energy Transfer' with a slight sci-fi twist.
For a hot item, I thought about boiling water, so a kettle and a kitchen sink seemed to fit in. I liked the idea of this room being quite bare and purposeless, and then randomly in the corner there is this kitchen area, seemingly totally out of place, like the whole thing has just been teleported out of someone's house and into this room.
Additionally for the tile puzzle I came up with the idea of pieces of circuit board hidden around the room, which would need to be assembled on the wall in order to complete the circuit and power up the magnetic coils. I was originally thinking of making it one of those sliding puzzles that everyone loves(!), but I later changed my mind and made it more of a jigsaw, partly because I didn't want people to immediately see a sliding puzzle and stop playing the game, and partly because sliding puzzle games are not very easy for someone who is just learning actionscript to code.
Once I had most of the game elements decided on, I needed to decide where in the game to put everything, so I chose to draw myself a little map that laid all the elements out so I could get it all clear in my head. The middle of the map is drawn viewed directly down from above, then at the edge of each wall is the “front view” that shows how that side would look in game.
In this format I was able to make changes which helped shape the final game, note how the kettle has moved from the kitchen area in the previous sketch, to next to the Enertron. This was because I felt that that area needed a little more interest than just a wall and an Enertron. Plus having a kettle next to the sink is a dead give away, at least this way you have to explore the room a bit to work that out.
I also added the metal wall safe, and cryogenic storage unit on the view with the kitchen. Originally the plan was to just have liquid nitrogen as the source of cold, which was later replaced with the frozen alien embryo. Another addition at this stage was the remote control for the sphere, which solved a lot of the issues of how to move the sphere from one phase to the next. I was also trying to work out how many inventory slots would be required for the user interface at this point.
The numbers in red on the right were when I was trying to get the big screw in the floor to work. It took me far too long to work out how to get it to animate correctly, and to remember what state it had been left in when you left that view and returned again. However I learned a lot about the use of variables and if statements in coding that, and It was very satisfying when I finally got it to work.
This scan may answer one of the biggest questions people ask about the game – what is up with those weird numbers on the combination lock? Well basically I knew I wanted to include a combination lock, that I was going to hide a code somewhere in the game for it, but I wanted to add an extra twist by making it a small puzzle to figure out how to translate the english numbers into this weird “alien language”.
If you look at the bottom of the scan at the heavy black characters, you can probably see the vague outlines of the numbers 1 to 7. What I did was add additional lines to the numbers to try to “disguise” them, whilst still keeping them readable. Down the right side of the page I redrew each character to try to give each one a distinct form. In the final game I only used 1-5 for the lock, mainly because I thought that if people were really stumped trying to figure it out then they were more likely to guess the correct answer if there were only 5 numbers than if there were 7!
I also was trying to work out what to put inside the cryo unit. As is said above, I was originally going to use liquid Nitrogen, but on further thought I wanted something a bit more “creepy” and mysterious. So the alien embryo came into existence (which later turned out to be a mog-rat in cube core!). These rather rubbish sketches were some of my first ideas, I was thinking of a more humanoid alien. An early thought was to make it linked to the “biomechanical head” inside the sphere, this embryo could be created to be a part of one of those machines, complete with borg like cybernetic implants. This later changed when I had completed drawing the sphere's robot head, so the embryo became something more animal like, and less developed physically.
The final page featured some Ideas that I never implemented. I considered having a “bad ending” for players who got a little too clever for their own good by attempting to thaw the embryo. I envisaged the embryo growing almost immediately into a large, angry looking alien monster, which would promptly bite your head off resulting in a game over.
In the end I didn't include this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I didn't want to punish players for experimenting. Half this game RELIES on the player trying things out, dragging items to specific spots and seeing what happens. It seemed a bit harsh to make someone have to start all over again for making a simple mistake. Secondly, I didn't feel my skills as a flash animator were quite up to the task of animating an entire alien monster in a manner that didn't look clumsy or tweened. The rest of this page just shows how the buttons for the remote were assigned, and the order in which the user had to do things to get the hot water.
The small sketch in the bottom right was where I came up with the idea for the game name, up till that point I hadn't decided on a name, but after inventing the power cores and making them an essential part of the game, the name sphere core seemed to fit perfectly, leaving additional room to create further games in the series by simply keeping the suffix “core”.