Part five- a different direction

Right now it's two days after the submission deadline. My game has been rated 18 times, and played 40 times. It's pretty early to look back at it, and ponder what I learned, but the devlog deadline is tomorrow :)

Making a game in a genre you never tried before always comes with some risks. Most of the time it's discovering that you need to implement something, that you didn't think of earlier, but is necessary for the game to work. So you start with something not as ambitious. Don't want to overscope, right?

This resulted in making an anomaly hunt game, that is... well... really "by the numbers". Compared to "Exit 8", "Platform 8" or "Shinkansen 0"... feels like the only innovation was not putting a number in the title.

So looking back at "Dick Storm's day off", I'm wondering, how I could make this game feel more original.

1. Point of view. What if, instead of a first person camera, this game had a top down view. Of course- with first person camera, you are able to examine every detail of your environment very closely, but what if, instead of looking if a magazine cover changed, we were looking for extra benches in the park, or a badly parked car, that wasn't there earlier?

2. Different gameplay. You are a passenger on a bus, so the environment moves around you. You don't have as much time to examine everything. In this case a wrong answer wouldn't reset you success count. Maybe just decrease it by one, or two.

2b. Or you are a sniper at the end of a long street, and you shoot the anomalies? That leads us to...

3. You need to point out the anomaly. Right now, it's possible to guess. Having to point out an anomaly (for example by lighting a candle near it, or shooting, like in the previous point) makes it less about blind guessing.

4. Fighting the anomaly! What if after finding an anomaly you must fight it WITH YOUR FISTS?! This idea is either awesome, or very dumb, but I'm kinda tired today, so I don't really know which is it.

Ok, at the end, what I think is, that I should have given the game more character.

Well, there's always the next time, right :)