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[Spectragate]

I've been playing around with a game idea for the last weekend or two, but I'm not really sure where to take it.

The very-very rough prototype can be seen here. It's just the first couple of basic levels: 
Unity Web Demo
Move with arrow keys. R restarts.

The things I like about it:
1) Instant movement: It has some mechanics that are fun to play with. When every action in the game takes place in 1 frame, it screws with your perceptions. In some other test levels I have some items you can pickup and use, but since everything takes place in 1 frame, you can't pickup and use the item in the same turn, so you have to make sure you move in a way that allows you time to use it. Portals were fun too, where you go zipping in and out of a bunch of portals and end up on the other side of the level in 1 frame.
2) Level momentum: When you kill an enemy on one floor, you teleport instantly to the next floor in the same position travelling in the same direction. This means the way you complete one level sets up how you start the next level. The idea of your positioning getting cumulatively worse and the player going back and optimizing it I like.

What I don't like:
Puzzles: I originally saw this as a puzzle game, but the more I made the puzzles the more I realized I was limiting what the player could do. Ideally I envisioned this as a dungeon crawler that you blast through at a million miles an hour (kind of like a binding of isaac you can finish in a few minutes), but the puzzle floor layouts just were not working well with that. It's hard enough to come up with a puzzle that has even one answer, but when the player could be starting from multiple entry points it became extremely hard not to focus the player down one set pathway.

So this is where I'm at. I really like the movement system, I like the speed of it. I think it could be interesting as a speed-run-dungeon-crawler, but I'm not sure if it's worth much more than a gimmicky idea.

What do you guys think - do you think something in this style as a binding-of-issac-on-crack style game could be fun? Is there perhaps other implementations of this idea that could work? I was thinking maybe throwing it into a bullet-hell style game...

[Mittens]

I won!
This was actualy pretty cool, would love if it had some anime blade/slice sounds for the kills
Also, you could so some awesome slow-mo effects for the smashing, killing etc.
Maybe when you move the screen could flash a little bit

I also hate puzzle games of this nature, so maybe you should instead make the player and enemies free to walk around initially,
then this instant slicing stuff could be a combat-mode which is timed.
You want to use the bullet time to get as many insta-kills as possible, and to do so requires elegant pathing (puzzle solving)
If you are a spaz at the "puzzle" then you run out of moves/time and you go back to walking around in real-time having to whack enemies to death manually, losing health all the while.

[valrus]

I think it has potential.

I think you're right about the puzzling, at least as it stands.  If there are, say, 4 solutions to a puzzle, but two of those solutions make the next puzzle (or even the next puzzle) unsolvable, then players are going to get frustrated.  Going back and optimizing is an interesting conceit, looking at it from a designer's point of view, but it would have to be presented in such a way that you're not implying the player is failing due to information you're withholding.  (Like infinite "rewind time" undo mapped to one button, and done within the game itself, not a meta-game thing like restarting the game.)

However, in general, the nature of this movement sets up everything to be a puzzle whether you intend it that way or not.  The player would need some more movement freedom to escape the puzzle trap.  Like Mittens says; maybe you can move around and set things up for a good combo, then go into bullet time and pull it off.

Or, when you kill an enemy, you end up on the space right after them.  Then, if enemies can move even if you don't (like you have a "wait" command or it's in real-time), you can use a moving enemy as a point-of-decision.  (Like, say you have an enemy patrolling back and forth horizontally: by timing your attack you can decide what column you end up in.)

A third possibility is to take movement off the grid -- all movement is until-you-hit-something, but you've got complete freedom in choosing your angle.

[Spectragate]

Thanks for the feedback guys 

@Mittens: I really like that idea. If the enemies are perhaps chasing after the player and your trying to get them into good positions to activate your bullet-time, that could be fun. I think moving away from the puzzles would also allow more simpler level design overall - part of the reasons I was getting a bit put-off with the puzzle mechanics is that I wanted to finish this thing in a month, and fussing over puzzles was blowing that out.

@valrus: The problems you listed with the puzzles is exactly the issues I was running into. It's funny you mention the rewind time mechanic - I have that feature in my local dev build, but for some reason when I exported it, unity broke. But the original idea was you can undo your moves one by one all the way back to the start of the game.

I also like the idea that killing the enemy places you on that tile - that makes movement way more predictable for the player.

 

[valrus]

I like the chasing idea, especially if you have little or no defense against them in normal mode.  It makes turning-to-fight a lot more dramatic.

Oh, another movement-freedom mechanic that I forgot to put down is having walls and/or other obstacles be breakable.  You can come across some sort of, say, cave formation, or a random collection of barrels, and say "Oh, if I just tapped here and here and here, that would make a perfect trap."  That adds a puzzle element without you having to create the puzzles manually.