Faultline

Summary

Faultline is a game based on a hexagonal grid of tiles. Players attempt to remove groups of tiles from the bottom of the grid - the view slides up the grid each time the bottom row is cleared.

Concept

Imagine a glacier calving as is reaches the ocean - that's basically the principle Faultline operates on. Faults appear in the 'ice' (between tiles) which the player can extend by targetting tile intersection points. When a group of tiles is completely separated from the rest, it falls away (like an iceberg from a glacier.)

Details

The story involves the player mining ice asteroids for fresh water - each block of ice removed is logged against their quota. The player must keep up with their quota or they lose the game, meaning that the player must be strategically careful about what areas of ice they attempt to remove - a larger area may provide more water, but may take too long to remove.

Play progresses across five difficulty levels - Training, Easy, Medium, Hard and Brutal. A game at each level takes about five to ten minutes, and successfully completing a game at one difficulty level unlocks the next one - it also affects the starting position of the next level, as the player carries forward their score from the previous level. This encourages the player to replay the earlier difficulty levels later, to give themselves a better starting point in the later levels, and to push up their overall score.

Advanced

Beyond the basic mechanism of extending cracks by clicking tile intersections, there's other factors that come into play: * Ice thickness. As the game advances, areas of the ice get thicker (indicated by a change in colour.) Thicker has less natural cracks in it, and is less likely to crack when targetted. * Special tools. A selection of advanced equipment become available through bonuses collected from special tiles. A flamethrower can be waved across the whole play field for a limited time, reducing ice thickness and causing cracking. A railgun fired at a particular tile will do devestating damage, removing that tile and driving cracks between the surrounding tiles.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer Faultline comes in two flavours - Lockstep and Brawl. Lockstep involves taking time-limited turns, with the time-limit selectable between fast (about four seconds) and slow (about ten seconds.) Brawl takes place in real-time - the faster a player works, the more bonus multipliers they get. For both varieties, a colour-coded 'scroll-bar' on the side of the play area indicates the relative progress of each player through the whole ice-field - the first to clear a certain amount of ice wins. The bonuses available in the single-player version are mirrored with attack bonuses that can be used against the opponent - snow balls fill in cracks, and a strategically targetted grappling hook can tear out an opponent's carefully shaped ice fragment.

An online ladder for comparing overall high scores, and an opponent-matching service would be desirable - Friend finding features would be popular too.