Pillow Fortress
This idea came as a collaborative effort between myself and Eric Harm.
Pillow Fortress: A single player fort building simulation with an isometric perspective and simple point-and-click interface.
Goal: To optimize the construction of a fortress based on the available materials within each room.
Challenges: Resources and space are limited and gravity will tend to collapse the constructions.
The premise of Pillow Fortress is that the unnamed playable character’s parents are spending the night out and her older sister is baby-sitting. To celebrate, she’s going to pass down the ancient art of pillow fortress construction. The tutorial for the game would be her first lessons.
In Pillow Fortress, players are presented with two gameplay options: free play and challenge. Free play is self explanatory. In challenge mode, each level is presented with a certain goal. A few examples could be:
- Build a fort that can hold three people sitting
- Build a fort that can hold two people laying down
- Build a fort that can support two heavy pillows
- Build a tunnel from an existing fort to the kitchen
- Remove and replace dad’s favorite chair without knocking down the fort
Each of these levels takes place within a different room of the house. Different rooms have different dimensions as well as various door sizes. Open rooms would leave extra space outside of the their bounds which would allow for rearrangement, but not construction. More challenging levels would have smaller doors through which only little and compressible items can be moved out for rearrangement. This adds a puzzle element to the simulation.
The actual gameplay would involve rearranging the items that exist within the room in order to construct the fort. Players can use items such as:
- Pillows
- Couches
- Chairs
- Tables
- Blankets
- Cushions
Each of these items could vary in size, weight, and comfort. These properties could also perhaps be modified during construction. For example, blankets could be folded to increase comfort or unfolded to decrease weight density.
This logo that Eric drew up demonstrates the visual style:
The point and click interface of this game makes it a great candidate for code-phobic middle-ware such as Multimedia Fusion or Game Maker. We’re still poking Clearacross around, but it’s likely that we’ll give this one a shot.
