Rusty and the Treasure Thief

Rusty and the Treasure Thief

In this much-anticipated sequel to Rusty’s Treasure Hunt, drag and drop instructions to help Rusty navigate through the jungle, even recruiting other animals to get past obstacles. Interactive games like this one are great for helping children develop a number of important skills, including fine-motor skills and critical thinking. The fun theme also helps to keep children focused on the activity itself, making the learning process more effective.

This game had a few requirments:

• Control a character via scratch styles blocks
• The player must be able to drag these blocks
• Each level needs a sequence of blocks the player needs to fix/debug

Again, like with the 1st Rusty game, I had creative freedom. A jungle setting was chosen to help the game thematically link up to the 1st game and provided many opportunties for a wide variety of level mechanics. The intro cutscene also starts with showing Rusty obtaining the treasure from the postgame level of the 1st game. 

The direct sequel route was taken as Rusty 1 and Rusty 2 would be for KS1 and I thought the players would appriciate the games being connected.

A decision to keep the input as simple as possible while following the requirments was made to minimise confusion. This game is aimed at those who have never programmed before and this will in many cases be a player's first exposure to any form of coding interface.

Creating a user interface that was simple and clear was the top priority. If this wasn't done well, the entire game would not be fun and hard to play. Over 1 month was spent on the sequence system and UI and tweaks were made throughout development.

This system consisted of multiple states:

• Planning state - Allow the user to edit the instruction blocks
• Interpreting state - Convert the instruction blocks to an action sequence
• Execution state - Rusty executes the actions in order

Each level has an existing sequence consiting of actions. Each action has an instruction block. The player can change the values of the action blocks, add new blocks or delete blocks. Each action will move Rusty x amount of steps in a direction. There is a limit of 10 actions per level. The player drags and drops the instruction blocks (like with Scratch). Blocks will have a black shadow to inform the player if they drop the instruction block, it will snap to the location of the shadow.

New mechanics:

• Sequence system to move Rusty
• Level codes to allow players to save and resume progress
• Bonus level codes - allow distrubution of new levels after release
• Springs - bounce Rusty to a location specified by an x
• Animal companions - These follow Rusty and remove obstacles, a way to spice up the key system
• Walk switches, these flip between off and on when Rusty walks over them, when all are on, something will happen
• Spin tiles - these will make Rusty spin in a direction until she hits a solid object or another spin tile
• Cutscenes - there are 4 ingame cutscenes that play after certain levels and 1 animated cutscene
• Drag and drop code block system

A wide variety of puzzle elements were introduced for multiple reasons. The first reason was to keep the game engaging, 30 levels is a lot and variety is needed to help motivate the player to try and get to the end.

Secondly, it allows for more problem solving. If this game was just about moving Rusty from point A to B, this wouldn't be a hard game, especially with the 10 block limit. Adding mechanics added a new layer of depth to the problem solving. It's not just getting Rusty from A to B, it might be A to B to C while keeping it efficient as there is a 10 block limit. It also encourged experimentation, the player may not know exactly how a spring or animal companion works. They can find out by pressing play as the default sequence of a level with a new mechanic will show off how the mechanic works. Even if the player doesn't fully understand something, if they know it works, they can leave it alone and just focus on the part of the sequence that needs fixing. 

This element is crucial as this is common when working on large code bases or a foreign codebase. The walk switches also teach the very basics of Binary and the And boolean operator without ever mentioning those words. The springs just move Rusty from 1 point on a map to another without consuming any additional steps and animal companions are reskins of the key from the first Rusty game. Albeit, they required a lot of work as they walk, animate and have different obstacles to remove.

The spin tiles were a fun mechanic from some Pokemon Games I played as a child, so I wanted to include them to add an element of chaos to some of the levels. Feedback tells us that many players enjoyed this inclusion.

Rusty and the Treasure Theif has an interactive tutorial that holds your hand on levels 1 and 3. The 1st one introduces the game and how change direction. Level 2 tests your understanding and has a solution of, click the direction button until it points up. Level 3 introduces changing step counts and level 4 tests your understanding.

For other mechanics introduced later in the game, the level where a new mechanic is introduced will have the exiting sequence show off the mechanic, the level following will test the player's understanding. 

The final level uses all the new mechanics (apart from the animal companions), together to test the player's knowledge.

This game is for the WebGL platform. Link to the game: https://www.twinkl.co.uk/resource/rusty-and-the-treasure-thief-t-i-1663074495

This game requires a Twinkl subscription to play so a two full walktrhough videos have been included. One shows the maingame and one shows the postgame.