Blog Quest 2: Design a Game Item - Dr.Mario

For this blog quest, I have designed a game item for the classic Nintendo puzzle game, Dr.Mario.

Dr. Mario is a classic Nintendo tile matching puzzle game where Mario plays the role of a doctor, and he throws medical capsules into a bottle to clear viruses. The gameplay is similar to Tetris. The puzzle area is represented by a bottle, and the viruses are represented as colored and animated tiles. Mario throws new tiles into the puzzle and the player can rotate and place the pieces medical capsules to match their color. To clear tiles, the player has to match 4 tiles horizontally and/or vertically. The goal of the game is to clear puzzles which is done by eliminating the virus tiles in the puzzle. The player fails if the capsules cover the bottleneck of the puzzle area. Below is a video of the gameplay.

The item I am suggesting for this game is essentially a Power-up tile. The power-up tile appears when a player matches 6 or more tiles.

These are the following features of the Power-up tile:

1. The Power-up tile will only take up one space, unlike the capsules which take up two.
2. The Power-up tile will have a color.
3. The Power-up tile will have to be matched like any other tile in the game.
4. Once matched, all the matching tiles in that line will explode and destroy the tiles one space adjacent to them.

The main idea behind this item is to add some variety to the puzzle in general while adding a new element that changes the strategy behind clearing virus tiles.

As I played the game again today, and even when I played the re-release on Game Boy Advance when I was younger, I found it especially repetitive and dull. All the tiles look the same, and the strategy is pretty straightforward. I got bored very quickly. Another problem I had with them game is that you aren't tangibly rewarded in some way for clearing a large amount of tiles. I also found that I could actually get a virus tile stuck and spend way more time than I should just trying to clear one virus tile.

The power-up I am proposing will hopefully change this with its effect of destroying adjacent tiles. I can mostly see it being used to clear areas that may be blocked off such that you can restart a small area of the puzzle. A tile can still get stuck - it can even be caused by using the power-up tile - but players can always get it again by matching 6 tiles and get another shot at clearing the viruses without feeling like their time is wasted.

Given that the tile only appears when a player matches 6 tiles or more it will challenge the player to actually match more tiles at once, a feature that is supported already but not rewarded. Players won't necessarily be focusing on getting the minimum amount of tiles to clear viruses, as they may be able to use the power-up to clear multiple virus tiles in one go.