This was a project for my Game Design, Prototyping, and Production course. The assignment was to make an improved version of Sudoku. When I do Sudoku puzzles I often fill in squares with possible answers that I later eliminate through logical deduction. For this game, my idea was: what if those possibilities could be eliminated in a different way?
Sudoku is a completely logic-based puzzle game, which can sometimes make it boring. By adding a skill- and timing-based aspect, I hoped to make it more appealing to fans of action games. I also wanted to balance this skill against logic, where if you were great at the action part you could ignore most of the logic and vice versa, with the typical strategy lying somewhere in the middle. The design I came up with, which appears in the finished game, is this: after filling in possibilities, you can choose to "battle" for that square, where each possibility becomes a tower you must destroy. The more possibilities you leave, the more towers there are, and the harder the battle becomes. Eliminating obviously wrong candidates through logic will make the battle much easier, and battles on squares of 2 or 3 possibilities will usually result in a victory.
I did most of the battle minigame implementation, with another developer doing the Sudoku board. We also had two artists and a sound person working on the aesthetics.
