The Artistic Approach

Taking a look at the map in the previous section, it is very clear that navigation is the key to solving this game for the player. The key problem for the implementation of the game is twofold. First, you need to make the rooms unique. Second you have to link the rooms together. Linking the rooms together can be simply done by having the door buttons go to the correct frame of the movie. But how do you distinguish between the six different rooms?

I don’t consider myself an artist, though I’m not too bad at drawing. Certainly I could become a much better artist if I spent the time working on the art, but programming and design are really what interest me. If I were an artist, the room problem would easily be solved through artistic means. Each room would be assigned some type of theme and would be created from scratch to be a unique room. The colors would only be used for the map and would have limited or no relationship to the colors of the rooms. If I was really ambitious, the rooms would also be furnished. Here are the themes I personally would assign to the colors:

• Red - a meadow in the spring time.
• Green - modernistic room. Modern design (in my opinion) is more about showcasing and bragging. Money is at the heart of this and green is the color associated with money.
• Blue - gothic. Columns for sure. Crypt like look.
• Cyan - ice palace.
• Yellow - Arabian nights.
• Purple - cartoon. Classic cartoon, not anime (though I have nothing against anime).

Lack of a budget (both a time budget and a monetary budget) really did make this approach unpractical. The artists out there may notice that the source code is in fact laid out as six separate rooms even though the same image is used for the room. It would be fairly easy to design a custom look for each of the rooms with no major changes being needed for the code. If any artist out there is interested in doing this, I would love to see the results.