Want to help with a future project of mine?

[Dellexe]

Hello friends of the 17th Shard!

 

Next year I'm starting a game design course. One of my projects I plan to do is to create some type of game set in the world of Warbreaker.

 

What I want from you guys are ideas! What do you think should be included in a game where you play an Awakener? I'm looking mainly for gameplay mechanics that are fun and make sense in the Warbreaker world.

 

 

These are just a few ideas I've had so far, feel free to tell me how stupid I'm being with some of them.

 

---Third person camera

My vision of this right now is that the combat will involve fast motion (jumping around with Awakened clothing and ropes) and the third person camera allows for much better control and awareness in games with this style, in my opinion.

 

---Combat system a blend of the Witcher combat system and the Assassin's creed combat system.

The Assassin's creed combat system is really cinematic, but it mainly feels like you're just pressing a couple buttons and it isn't very interactive. The Witcher system is very interactive, and when meshed with the cinematic nature of the Assassin's Creed system could end up looking and feeling very impressive.

 

---Parkour system

My idea for the game right now has it set open-world in the city of T'Telir. The player would navigate the city with a parkour system similar to the Assassin's Creed freerunning system, with some minor Awakening abilities to help along the way.

 

---Hemalurgy, because why not.

This is one of my more random ideas. The player can perform a complicated finisher move on opponents to steal their Breath with a Hemalurgic spike and transfer it to themselves. I'm trying to find a way to make this work in the world, but I may scrap it. It gives the player incentive to use different tactics when defeating enemies. It could also figure into the heath-regen system somehow (health regenerates passively over time, but when you steal Breath from someone you gain an increase in your health-regen, temporarily, something like that).

 

 

What do you think? Give me questions, comments, oh-gosh-what-are-you-doings, and other concerns please.

 

(P.S. Would you like to destroy some evil today?)

[Aether]

This sounds amazingly cool!

 

I would like to point out, however, that Awakening is somewhat of an odd-ball as opposed to a lot of other of Brandon's magic systems. Jumping around with ropes and Awakened capes sounds cool and all, but ideally, I think you would profit from trying to recreate the flexibility of the it in the game. Give the player the possibility of making Lifeless shock-troopers (if they learn the command), to make little straw men that can create distractions, to make traps for pursuing soldiers by running past Awakened carpets or drapes and whatnot.

 

And I think adding Hemalurgy would be really cool, but you should find a way to balance it out, such as making every new Hemalurgic spike (as long as it is in use) put a strain on the player's ability to Awaken, or to warp him/her physically so that he becomes less healthy, or something. There should also be alternative ways of getting Breath, such as buying it (duh!), beating up/convincing commoners to give them away (though alienating them in the process), doing the same for officials with much more Breath, etc..

 

Hope that helps!

[Quiver]

Meant to say this sooner, but WARBREAKER GAME, YES.

...anyway, I'm not here for long, so I just have one suggestion to make. Breath is the hardest magic system to get more of, since it needs to be given away, not taken. Hemalurgy probably could steal it, so I guess that would work as a gameplay mechanic, but I had an alternative that might be interesting to consider:

What if throughout the game you don't earn breaths, you unlock commands?

As an example... you start off with, say, 10 breaths. You can 'equip' breaths to items to Awaken them, and unequip them at anytime to get the breath back. You start with a very limited number of commands, but as you go through the game you unlock more, meaning you have to choose which commands to use, what items to awaken and how much breath to invest in them; breaths could be a purchasable resource (for absurd amounts of money, of course) meaning as the game goes on, and more options open to you, it gets harder to max out a particular ability, but you could have a range of options.

[Dellexe]

This sounds amazingly cool!

 

I would like to point out, however, that Awakening is somewhat of an odd-ball as opposed to a lot of other of Brandon's magic systems. Jumping around with ropes and Awakened capes sounds cool and all, but ideally, I think you would profit from trying to recreate the flexibility of the it in the game. Give the player the possibility of making Lifeless shock-troopers (if they learn the command), to make little straw men that can create distractions, to make traps for pursuing soldiers by running past Awakened carpets or drapes and whatnot.

 

And I think adding Hemalurgy would be really cool, but you should find a way to balance it out, such as making every new Hemalurgic spike (as long as it is in use) put a strain on the player's ability to Awaken, or to warp him/her physically so that he becomes less healthy, or something. There should also be alternative ways of getting Breath, such as buying it (duh!), beating up/convincing commoners to give them away (though alienating them in the process), doing the same for officials with much more Breath, etc.

 

Hope that helps!

I have thought about creating Lifeless as a gameplay mechanic and I quite like it. It has to be balanced, though. It can't be easy to create a unstoppable squad of soldiers. There will probably be some sort of level requirement in order to create actual Lifeless soldiers, but you have the ability to create Lifeless animals to serve as distractions/traps earlier in the game. Buying Breath would be part of the game but would be very expensive. Intimidating people into giving you Breath would work as a mechanic, maybe building off of how "well known" you are in the game. The more dark things you do, the more you can use your reputation to influence people, that kind of thing.

 

Meant to say this sooner, but WARBREAKER GAME, YES.

...anyway, I'm not here for long, so I just have one suggestion to make. Breath is the hardest magic system to get more of, since it needs to be given away, not taken. Hemalurgy probably could steal it, so I guess that would work as a gameplay mechanic, but I had an alternative that might be interesting to consider:

What if throughout the game you don't earn breaths, you unlock commands?

As an example... you start off with, say, 10 breaths. You can 'equip' breaths to items to Awaken them, and unequip them at anytime to get the breath back. You start with a very limited number of commands, but as you go through the game you unlock more, meaning you have to choose which commands to use, what items to awaken and how much breath to invest in them; breaths could be a purchasable resource (for absurd amounts of money, of course) meaning as the game goes on, and more options open to you, it gets harder to max out a particular ability, but you could have a range of options.

Using Commands to progress is a pretty logical thing to do. As you progress through the game you learn more complicated and powerful commands.

-

The Awakening "crafting" system is a great idea. I'm thinking that it takes a few seconds to Awaken objects, requiring you to Awaken them beforehand and have a limited supply of them during a battle.

[A Joe in the Bush]

This Thread was made a While ago. It has lots of good Ideas for you To Spike a Away.

[Swimmingly]

You could have a abduction mechanic where you kidnap citizens holding Breath, take them back to a dungeon, and torture them until they give it to you!

You could then embalm the corpses and reAwaken them with their own Breath, but under your complete control!

[Quiver]

GTA: Nalthis?

I'd LOVE to see the news' reaction to that.

[Peng the Just]

You could have a abduction mechanic where you kidnap citizens holding Breath, take them back to a dungeon, and torture them until they give it to you!

You could then embalm the corpses and reAwaken them with their own Breath, but under your complete control!

Are you on kurk's list yet? Because you should be

[Kobold King]

Are you on kurk's list yet? Because you should be

 

Allow me to just say that you're not the first person to have asked that question. And do you really need a list just to know not to follow Swimmingly into dark alleys?

[Swimmingly]

Actually, I am, and have been for a while

[shawnhargreaves]

Hi - I'm a professional game developer so this thread got my attention!

 

First a couple of questions if I may?

 

- Is your goal to actually implement this game, or just to design it on paper?

- How big a team do you have, and how much time to finish it?

 

I hate to be a party pooper, but there are several things about Awakening that will be technically challenging to pull off in game form:

 

It makes heavy use of cloth and rope, which are difficult to animate, even more difficult to calculate physics on, tough to accurately check for collisions against the environment, and hard to render in a realistic way.  You could waste a lot of time dealing with hard technical issues like how to draw a thin piece of rope in a way that will be clearly visible to the player, how to shade an animating cloak so they can tell what it is doing while obeying complex Commands, how to stop that cloak from accidentally going through walls, etc.

 

Another challenge is the extremely open ended nature of Awakening.  Much of the fun in this magic system is the wide range of objects that can be Awakened, range of Commands they can be given, and extremely varied purposes to which they can be put.  But "open ended" and "student project" do not happy bedfellows make!  My advice to beginners (for that matter also to experts working on limited budgets or with small teams) is that the path to success is choosing a scoped, targeted design that requires you to do only one or two things really well.  Think Portal rather than GTA.

 

Minor but important detail:  Breath is crucial to Awakening, but Breath is invisible!  You will need to find some way to make it visible to the player, so they can understand how much they have put where and which objects they need to get it back from.  There are many possible solutions to that, but my instinct is it'll probably be more time consuming than you expect to find the right one.

 

Oh boy, reading it back, the above sounds really negative!  I really don't mean it that way - just want to make sure you understand what you are biting off here.

 

To put this in context: if a publisher came to me asking to fund a 100-person team to spend a year building this game, I'd say boy, there's a lot of potential in the idea and it's an exciting project, but also very risky so I'd want to spend a month or two prototyping with a smaller team (~10 person) before promising anything.   If a student of mine proposed the idea, I'd push them hard to pick one of Brandon's more constrained magic systems instead.  Physical Allomancy, one of the interesting Twinborn combinations, or perhaps Windrunning, would be an order of magnitude easier to implement in game form.

[Oudeis]

Minor but important detail:  Breath is crucial to Awakening, but Breath is invisible!  You will need to find some way to make it visible to the player, so they can understand how much they have put where and which objects they need to get it back from.  There are many possible solutions to that, but my instinct is it'll probably be more time consuming than you expect to find the right one.

 

I was going to correct you here but I think I misunderstood you at first... Breath itself is, actually, not invisible. It's a shimmery field of energy as it transfers between people, or between a person and an object. In the book, you can't tell by looking at a rope whether it's invested, because the energy is hidden inside of it, but the energy still isn't invisible, just hidden. You also mention "seeing" the breath in stuff you've Awakened. You're right, you typically wouldn't be able to "see" it, but you also don't "see" what's explained in the book as Lifesense. Since seeing and hearing (and I guess a rumble controller) are the only ways to get feedback from a game, you'd have to find a way to translate the effect (both Lifesense, and Awakened objects) into something the player can experience, like making people with strong Auras, or objects you've personally Awakened, glow.

 

That said... my solution is also my possibly very unpopular opinion to the whole scenario. I think you're right, it would take a huge number of people and an enormous budget and a LOT of time to accurately portray Awakening. That said, I think there are prolly a lot of ways to simplify the system into something that maybe could work in a video game, you'd just be untrue to the nature of the book itself.

 

You could artificially limit what can be Awakened. Ropes can be found around, but all you can do is animate them with two or three pre-programmed Commands, at which point they take on the shape of a game sprite and act out those things. A huge downside is that it will lose a lot of the 'feel' and awesomeness of being a real Awakener. An upside is, it's technically do-able.

 

The game does sound like it begs for one of those railroaded "be good or be evil" systems like Fable or Infamous. You can do good deeds, and a group of people who believe in your cause will periodically donate huge sums of Breath to you at once, or you can do terrible thing and demand Breath as tribute or you'll go around killing babies.

 

Random thought: Why not be Returned? The start of a lot of video games gets stilted with, "the character has been living in this world his whole life, but the player needs a tutorial to learn how to open doors". Have your character wake up as a Returned at the start of the game. He'll speak the language and know what fruits are and not to jump off cliffs, but he won't know any people, and all the stuff that will have to get explained to the player, also has to get explained to him. The mystery of "who was I, why was I Returned" drives the game. It might explain why you're so good at Awakening; perhaps someone speculates at one point that in your past life you must've been a skilled Awakener, and some of that skill has transfered over, like how Lightsong was good at math and juggling. Or maybe you learn a lot about your past life at some point, and figure out that yes, you were in fact an amazing Awakener when you were alive. You'd start the game at Fifth Heightening, which could be fun, but still have to build up your store of "what you can Awaken/Command" from scratch. You'd be able to start the game with decent Life Sense. If you want to have hit points, you'll want a way for people to heal, so maybe you can decide that Returned can sacrifice more than 1 Breath per week in order to heal damage. Also, a Returned is in the perfect position to become the head of a cult of devoted followers willing to give up their Breath to you. Also, between your Return and the Hallandren Court of Gods, that sets it up for the dichotomy; do you follow the "Good" path and take your place as a typical God? Or perhaps in your first moments of life, did someone with a different plan tell you that there's another way, that you don't have to march to their tune, you can take the power and earn your own freedom. As the game progresses, you get visions like Lightsong did to move plot along, until at the climax your purpose is finally revealed to you, and you make one final decision whether you follow through with Endowment's plan for you, or reject its vision and forge your own path.

 

Just a few random thoughts. TL;DR version: I agree with Shawn. A realistic, representative translation of Awakening, as Sanderson portrayed in Warbreaker, would be next to impossible. You should strongly consider either picking a different magic system, or a simplified (and regrettably inaccurate) version of Awakening. Personally, I think you should go with a translation on Awakening.

 

Failing that, I'd love to see AonDor on the DS.

 

EDIT: Typo.

Edited June 8, 2014 by Outis

[Swimmingly]

I agree that the Returned plotline is perfect for a video game. I think a really awesome way for a game to start could be waking up in a pile of corpses, having just been hanged and left for dead. You break out of the body-collection cart and make your way into the underground, gradually learning about your past.

[Dellexe]

I agree with Outis, using a few pre-programmed Commands is better game design than trying to make a perfect representation of Awakening. The remedy to this is making a lot of these simple Commands usable in the world.

-

With regard to the visibility of Breath and other hard to portray attributes, I've been thinking of ways to fit them in. Breath in transit (passing from one person to another) would look like a kind of shimmering rainbow in the air (I'm drawing inspiration from the cover of the book). Breath Recognition would be portrayed in a small pop-up when you hover over characters (think the system in Watch Dogs where it gives you a brief description of the person you're targetting). Life Sense would be portrayed with an indicator on the screen that would show the general direction of people paying attention to you or just a simple minimap (I prefer the general direction indicator, combined with a slight humming from stereo audio it fits in with the world much better than a minimap. Objects you've Awakened would also shimmer slightly and people with lots of Breath would have a similar shimmer.

-

I like the Returned idea! You could meet Vasher or Hoid at the beginning and they'd explain some of your Returned powers. The shapeshifting could be useful for stealth sections where you're trying to blend in with the crowd. I also like the idea of sacrificing Breath to heal your wounds.

[Swimmingly]

Or you could go with Awakened bandages - Grab Things. It's not perfect, but healing systems in games never are.

[Dellexe]

I was thinking of a few Commands to be used in game that aren't in the books.

 

One a rope or whip to use as a weapon: Upon call, strike things

 

On a short (2 - 3 feet in length) piece of rope: Strangle things when thrown. (You unlock this going down the dark path)

 

On a shirt: Become as my arms and strengthen them

 

On a rug: Snare things

 

On a curtain: Grab when touched

[Swimmingly]

You could make the light path involve high-cost but ultimately end-neutral Awakening and the dark path involve killing people to make into Lifeless servants, which costs Breath

[shawnhargreaves]

May I ask how much your goal is to actually create this game in a playable form, vs. just coming up with ideas for its design?

 

If you are planning to implement it for real, I would be happy to share advice on how to go about that.   This is an area I know well after 18 years in the industry (roughly half of that as a lead programmer).

[Dellexe]

May I ask how much your goal is to actually create this game in a playable form, vs. just coming up with ideas for its design?

 

If you are planning to implement it for real, I would be happy to share advice on how to go about that.   This is an area I know well after 18 years in the industry (roughly half of that as a lead programmer).

 

I bow before thy knowledge and wisdom, great one.

-

Right now I'm just gathering ideas for its design, but I will eventually make this when I feel prepared to. That may be pretty far off in the future, though.

Any advice you have would be greatly appreciated!

[Argent]

Hmm, the first thing I thought of was actually a puzzle / escape game. To add a humorous spin to it, you could make it about Vasher escaping from various prisons - because it's funny how many things begin with begin thrown in a prison. I imagine objects would a limited amount of color you can potentially drain, you could have a number of basic commands (with more as you progress / level), and your Breaths would have to be kind of on the low end (for Vasher). The Heightenings could also play a role maybe. 

[Swimmingly]

That sounds like an awesome, and much more manageable, game. I'd love to see that as an Android app.

[Aether]

I think a really awesome way for a game to start could be waking up in a pile of corpses, having just been hanged and left for dead. You break out of the body-collection cart and make your way into the underground, gradually learning about your past.

This is basically the opening of Kingdoms of Amalur, which was an amazingly mediocre game, btw, which could have been so much better.

[shawnhargreaves]

Right now I'm just gathering ideas for its design, but I will eventually make this when I feel prepared to. That may be pretty far off in the future, though.

Any advice you have would be greatly appreciated!

 

Ok, here goes!

 

My main feedback is that this design is far too complicated to be achievable on a student/indie scale.  I hope you won't take this opinion in a negative way, as I think there is actually a ton of potential for great games based on Brandon's work.  Because I think this, I would love to see you be successful in making such a game and proving that one of his magic systems can be a foundation for excellent gameplay.   So I would love to see you be smart about scoping your design to something that can realistically be successful with the resources you have available to implement it  (to be clear, I don't know what these resources are - but I'm guessing it's you plus maybe a few friends, and that you don't have millions of dollars to spend on the project?)

 

Choosing the right scope for a game design is more important than many other art forms, for a couple of reasons.  You'll often see similar advice given to people starting out in other areas ("write lots of practice short stories before attempting a novel";  "learn the guitar by practicing your scales before you try to play Hendrix") but there are plenty of examples where people have been successful doing the exact opposite.  Brandon started writing epic fantasy novels right from day one, worked hard at it, got better and better the more he wrote, and clearly turned out ok.  But games are different because:

 

1)  Big commercial examples are INSANELY expensive to make these days.  A typical AAA game is the work of between 50 and 100 people, usually for about 3 years.  To make something similar requires not just talent but also massive resources, which is different from pretty much all other art forms except film making.  The only thing stopping me from writing Stormlight is that I'm not (anywhere near) as good a writer as Brandon, but even if I had all the necessary specialized abilities, on my own it would take several hundred years to make a game like Assassin's Creed!  Of course there are excellent indie games (just like there are indie movies) made with far fewer resources, but these aren't just smaller scale versions of the same sort of designs the AAA games are using.  Smart indie developers think differently, pick their battles wisely, and choose designs that can be fun after they implement just one or two rather than hundreds of different features, and which won't require huge amounts of expensive content (artwork, animations, level design etc.)

 

2)  Game making involves engineering as well as art, and this means failure is usually hard rather than soft.  By which I mean that if a novelist, musician or painter takes on a task that is too ambitious, they will usually still end up with a book, song or painting - it just won't be as good as they were hoping for.  They can still show it to friends, get feedback, analyze its flaws, and lean from it so as to do better next time around (which is exactly the process Brandon followed to give us amazing things like WoK).  But when an engineering project is too ambitious, the result is a hard failure where you don't end up with anything working at all, and thus there is not much to be learned from the experience.  I've been there more than once myself - it's a very depressing place to end up, highly not recommended :-)  This makes it important to choose game projects with appropriate scope to fit the available abilities and resources.  Stretching yourself a little bit is good (that's how you learn and grow) but stretching too far leaves you with no game at all after lots of hard work.

 

Ok, that's enough about scope.  My other main feedback is about focus.

 

Lack of focus is the most common weakness I see in new game designers.  This is natural - they're full of excitement and creativity, so why settle for just one or even ten ideas when there are hundreds more just waiting to be invented?  But it's actually almost always better to focus on just one or two core ideas because:

 

1)  Doing one thing really well produces a more fun game than doing many things less well.

 

2)  Having too many ideas contributes to impossible-to-actually-implement scope.  It takes thousands of times longer to implement an idea than to come up with it, so if you spend eg. one whole day inventing ideas, the result is already a huge pile of implementation work!

 

3)  Most of what people actually do while playing a game is very repetitive, and is at a lower level than what we tend to think of as game design ideas.  When we say "fight your way into a building", what the player actually does most is "move crosshair over enemies, then press fire button".  It might seem kinda stupid to say that a game design is all about aiming and shooting things, but in fact that's the core mechanic of probably 90% of the revenue the industry makes today!  And it's this kind of low level mechanic that is most important to get right.  If these fundamental, repetitive actions feel satisfying and rewarding to the player, the game will be fun almost no matter what you later layer on top of them, but if they aren't quite right, no amount of clever higher level design can save the day.  Having too many ideas too early in development tends to distract from spending the time to properly tune these fundamental mechanics.

 

Most successful game designers do some version of this, but Miyamoto is famous for formalizing it.  During the early concept phase of Nintendo games, he insists that a single core mechanic be identified, and then implemented in a simplified, sandbox type test environment.  For Mario, that mechanic is jumping.  So he would build a single screen containing maybe one vertical wall and two platforms, and then program a Mario sprite so you could move and jump between them.  No enemies, no score, no progression - not really any gameplay at all.  Just jumping.  Is it fun?  He would spend months, in some cases I heard years although I don't know how true that is, tweaking this single mechanic until it was as fun as possible.  Once it got to the point that simply jumping back and forth from one platform to another was so dang satisfying that people would happily 'play' this even without any actual gameplay, he would move the game into full production, knowing that when all the extra higher level stuff was added over the top of this solid foundation, the game would be sure to turn out great.

 

I think you would greatly benefit from following a similar approach, especially since this is a somewhat original concept where there isn't a lot of existing control scheme design that can be inspired by previous games.   Build a single room with just a couple of objects in it, one of which is a piece of rope.  Implement your Awakening control scheme, use it to have the rope do things to the other objects  (like the scene in the book where Vivenna is practicing using a rope to pick up a glass of water) then keep tweaking and trying different things until it feels right - awesome and satisfying and fun to play with.

 

Starting out by proving a single core control mechanic will give you a solid understanding of what does vs. doesn't work when you later come to expand this into a full game design, which can avoid a lot of wasted time going down design dead-ends.  Creating such a thing also has some practical benefits.  If you find yourself needing other people to help make the game, there's nothing like a concrete demo to prove it will work and get them excited to help you.  And if you want to get a job in the industry after finishing your course (I'm guessing that must be your end goal in studying this area?) a demo will be invaluable for that too.

 

Finally, some concrete suggestions about ways you could reduce the scope of your design to make it more feasible to implement:

 

1)  Switch from 3D to 2D.  This reduces both programming cost (physics, collision detection) and art (modelling, animation) by a huge amount.  It's easy to mock up placeholder 2D art for prototyping, then go back later to insert real artwork, but 3D modelling is time consuming even to create rough placeholder versions early in development.

 

2)  If it must be 3D, make it 1st person.  Character modelling is hard and very time consuming, and animation even more so, so pick a design that won't require you to do those at all.

 

3)  Cloth and rope animation and collision detection is much harder than rigid bodies.   You can't really do Awakening without these, though, so if you aren't willing to consider a different magic system entirely  (Allomancy would be much less challenging!) I recommend choosing just rope to get right at first.

 

4)  Parkour / freerunning type gameplay is a monumental undertaking that places tough requirements on character animation systems, collision detection, and environment modelling.  I advise against taking this on at the same time as figuring out an Awakening control scheme, which is a big/hard/unknown/worthy challenge in itself - one big problem at a time should be more than enough to keep you busy :-)

 

Ok, I'm done typing now.  I hope this didn't come across as too negative.  I really would love to see you figure out how to use Awakening as a game control scheme - just trying to inject some reality into the best way to go about that.

 

Good luck!

[Oudeis]

Not to step on any toes... I think Shawn is absolutely right. And perhaps Kal Dell is already more on-board than we think he (or she) is. Your intro Game Design class prolly isn't going to ask you to make Assassin's Creed on day one. Perhaps a simple side-scroller with very simple objectives will be your final project. If you want it to look Warbreaker inspired, as long as you can make the sprites look right, mazel tov.

 

Shawn keeps mentioning ropes being hard to animate, versus rigid objects... can a rope not be a rigid object, however? I realize this will be more visually boring, but for a demo it might work. If you end up being able to design this as a huge game some day down the line when you've got millions of dollars, hundreds of employees, and four to five years, you can change it and do better. For now, maybe every "empty" rope you find is just the same picture repeated over and over, just a coil of rope identical to every other coil. Remember, human-shaped things take fewer Breaths, and you might start the game as an Awakener who needs to husband your small supply. Maybe once you Awaken a rope, it just become a sprite, the outline of a person, and follows the same "physics" rules as any human body would, and just walks around the screen, jumping and moving left to right, following your Command.

 

Someone before mentioned Awakening being a less active power, and I liked his idea. So, for example, you've got a pool at the moment of 100 Breaths that you can use. You wander around for a bit and "pick up" three coils of rope. On your Awakening menu screen, you're shown the Objects you have, the Commands you know, and the Breaths you've got available. Let's say, for the sake of sake, that one of the Commands you currently have mastered that will work on Rope is, "Upon call, walk forward and grab people who aren't me." This is a 25 Breath Command. (Yeah I realize that's prolly low considering actual in-book mechanics, this is a hypothetical). With three ropes, you could Awaken all three with this Command, and your Pool of Breath would now be reduced to 25. You can assign the ropes to the A button, and now when you press it you do whatever "upon call" is considered, and the rope will animate into the form of a small person. It'll walk forward, and attempt to grapple any human it encounters, leaving you free to attack that person. If it gets hit, it falls to the ground in pieces. If it walks forward and hits a wall, it'll just keep walking into the wall until you reach it. Maybe the B button is the default, "Your Breath to mine" button that automatically puts the Object back in your inventory and replenishes your Pool of Breath.

 

Other Commands might be, "Protect Me" on your cloak that simply increases your base defensive stat; maybe more expensive "equipment" could be stuff designed to look more human-like, and therefore require fewer Breaths to give them more complicated Commands. Maybe you learn the Command "Protect me, and upon call, be as my arms and lift that which I must," but it costs 150 Breaths, and you've only got 100. But then at some point you buy/steal/make/forge a new Cloak, one designed to look more human, maybe one woven with some strands of your own hair for Focus, and it can do such a complicated Command for only 75 Breaths, increasing both your defensive stat and offensive one.

 

I realize all of this is far more complicated than the "jump" mechanic for Mario, and makes for a bad demo. Maybe pick something way simpler. A single long rope, and the Command, "Upon call, grab things other than me," and then you can make a room with random objects to pick up. If the Rope is Awakened to that command, you can equip it to the A button, and then whenever you the player hit A, the character whips out the rope, which grabs onto something.

 

Anyway. Like I said. I'm sure you're aware that this is your first Game Design class, and you surely realize that crafting a huge, complicated, immersive game prolly isn't how you'll end your first semester, any more than someone ends Spanish 101 as a fluent interpretor. I agree with Shawn. Use this opportunity to focus on one very simple aspect, and let that become the seed for what one day might grow into a game that makes people really feel like they are Awakeners.