Related posts:
- Starting Checkpoint
- Replay the Villain
- Triggers, Switches, & Other Categories of Creativi-Toys
- Giving those Generators some Power
There are some aspects to the Disney Infinity Hub that are fun - your character always starts at that spot, in an array of Sparks and a unique greeting. That's fun. The Infinity beacon is also cool, and if you'll permit the DC reference, it's a little like the "Bat Signal", but as if to identify, "The fun starts here". The four corner icons however are not fun. You just got through the load time of bringing in your personalized Toy Box, and these visually distracting lights obscure the view - and with a slight misstep, prompt the player as to whether he or she would like to travel somewhere else. My best guess is that this hub was the original design for transport, the Disney Infinity team generalized travel to be from anywhere within the Toy Box, then left the Hub because it looks cool. I would never use this toy, except for the fact that whenever you have more than one Checkpoint toy, the active one doesn't work to begin the game. Making matters a little worse for the Hub, you can't program connections from it .
The Virtual Base implementation on the PC Toy Box is nice. If there is to be a "Starting Checkpoint" toy added to the Toy Box, perhaps it should have the look & namesake of "Virtual Base" . It would have the single circle for the player to appear (where there could be multiple Virtual Bases throughout the Toy Box, with different Player designations for multi-player options). It could have the hexagonal slot denote the player number for clear multi-player support. Plus, it could have that Infinity beacon . Okay, the name "Virtual Base" would be ambiguous, but even if you called it "Starting Checkpoint" it could look like the Virtual Base . Unlike a regular Checkpoint, it would incorporate an automatic Reset of all toys like the Reset-O-Matic will hopefully do in DI2 . On a Replayer side-note, it would be useful for the Replayer to have a Property of "Playback" or "Clear" as part of its reset. Often it's used to make objects vanish in the game. With a reset attribute of "Playback", that lowers the number of connections necessary from the starting spot. Was also considering the various player challenges, where the character is equipped with some Tool or Pack at the start - wouldn't it be fun to program that from that starting point, the Virtual Base? In the vein of these Switches, where you could use a Goo Switch to start off with a Goo property, what about an Equip Switch? You could connect it to a Tool Generator, Pack Generator, Mount Generator, or Vehicle Generator. That would be tight. You could situate a multi-player race with different cars or different mounts, a single or dual-player Sphere-popping game with a Glide Pack or Space Ranger Pack, whatever. Connect that same Starting Checkpoint to an actual Stopwatch or a Timer and you have yourself a Challenge .
If there's going to be a Villain Generator, then the same Equip Switch could be used to provide that boss with all kinds of gear as well. That would be simpler than the "Replay the Villain" post made earlier. The Equip Switch could teach some computer science as well. The Starting Checkpoint and Generators can be used to discuss dynamic memory management, with their connections being the details of the Constructors. Sometimes a constructor will in turn dynamically create other objects. Good game mechanics can be educational .