Introduction

During the Experimental Gameplay project at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, I designed a game on my own titled Cynosure, which uses the concept of blinking as a game mechanic (to charge up the player's weapons power) in a game in which the player must destroy zombies advancing towards him in a graveyard.

The idea of the game was to have players view the gamescape through a supernatural eye. The fundamental game-play mechanic was the ability to blink. The concept behind the game, keeping in mind the Experimental Gameplay theme of ‘violate’, originally evolved from the behavior associated with Peeping Tom-ism. Cynosure was created on the OpenGL/C++ platform in a one week development cycle, where as game producer, I was responsible for all aspects of design, code, and artwork.

Cynosure Title Screen

Initial prototyping helped me manifold. Not only did it help me familiarize myself with the framework, it also proved which concepts would work and which ones wouldn’t. For instance, I was debating whether to make the blinking of an eye involuntary which is contrary to what we see in humans. This would have helped me direct the player’s attention to the more detailed aspects of Cynosure. It turned out the player was left with an experience that wasn’t quite as visceral had he/she been given the chance to blink as and when intended.

The secondary game-play mechanic devised in the game was the ability to “zap” zombies. The eye was fixated on a murky graveyard setting where every now and then zombies spawned from tombstones and tried to come toward the player.