OVERVIEW
The games playable on the Nokia 3310 followed a strict set of technology-specific limitations which allowed only for games with very basic design elements, depending greatly on simple images and pixels to communicate greater concepts. Inspired by this reliance on pixel art, my game proposal for this platform is a picture-based game which would have the player replicate an image on the screen to the best of their abilities, filling in and leaving empty certain pixels in order to attempt perfect replication.
CONCEPT
In this game, you are an art thief who steals paintings, pottery, jewelry, and other items from museums. In order to succeed at this, you have become very good at creating cheap replicas of the art to replace it with. You must replicate these art pieces pixel by pixel, offering convincing duplicates in order to get away with your crimes.
MECHANICS
For each round, the player has "stolen" an item from a museum: a vase, a statue, a painting, jewelry, a gemstone, etc. This item is show as a reference image which takes up half of the screen, comprised of dark green pixels. The player is then given a designated space within the empty half of the screen to replicate the image of that item pixel by pixel, trying to replicate the original as closely as possible.
For the purpose of having an increasing level of difficulty, the first and easier levels will have items where each singular "pixel" is a square comprised of a 4x4 pixel squares in which the player needs to fill in order to replicate the image of an item, making the image more simple and easier to replicate. As the player progresses in levels, the pixels will eventually be singular and the image will be much more difficult to replicate due to being higher in detail.
In order to win the round, the player will have to replicate the image within a certain percentage of similarity. For every pixel left blank or filled in when it is not reflected as such in the original image, they will receive 0 credit. For each pixel filled in with the correct shade, they will receive 1 credit. The score a player gets on a replicated item will be a reflection of these credits. For instance, if an original item has 50 pixels filled in that make up the image, and the player gets 41 correct at 1 credit, and 9 incorrect by placing a pixel incorrectly or not at all, they will have a total of 41/50, or 82%. Each item may have a different percentage requirement (70% for easy, 80% for medium, 90% for hard, 99% for extreme, etc.) but the winning condition remains that the player must match or exceed the similarity percentage requirement per level in order to win.
CONTROL SCHEME
Because of the layout of keys on the Nokia 3310, the player will use 2, 4, 6, and 8 keys as up, left, right, and down arrow keys in order to move between these pixels. The player will press the 5 key to place a dark green pixel, and can press the 5 key again to delete the pixel and leave that space blank.
Because the game will operate on a time constraint, they will be given anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes to replicate this item, which they can skip over by pressing the 9 key to run out the timer. The 7 key will give the option to exit the game.