You are Benjamin Salisbury, a handy watchmaker on a city suspended in space around a blazing sun, a futuristic space colony ship. You spend your days fascinated in your laboratory by the wonders of mechanical objects, especially the mechanics of gears. The citizens of the colony are the posh, wealthy families that can afford the luxury life of living in the stars, in a glamorous, well-maintained space city, far from the dreary lifestyle back on Earth.

You, however, have found your place on the colony through years of indentured service in the clockwork and mechanical repair business, as your family has done for generations. Not coming from money as many of your neighbors, you instead provide the people with a valuable service in this world run with gears and steam-age machinery. You are well regarded as a clever and ingenious craftsman, and citizens come to your shop first when their fancy electronics and watches are broken.

One day, a thunderous explosion and sudden, violent shaking interrupts your work on a beautifully intricate gadget, and the contents of your laboratory are thrown to the floor and walls. You run outside and you find the streets of the city all a panic. Confused citizens mill around and talk worriedly to each other. Looking through the gigantic glass dome above your town, as terrified citizens point into space, you see that the space colony has lost orbit and is now plummeting into the sun at an accelerating rate.

The people panic, but you run straight to the navigation room and helm of the ship, located inside city hall at the bow end of town. You arrive to find the captain-mayor missing, without a trace, but a mysterious open door beckons to you. Descending down a dark staircase, a faint ticking sound can be heard coming out of passage. You recognize it as the reassuring beat of a clock. But with another rumble, the door slams shut behind you, and the noise stops. You suddenly find yourself very alone. The only way to go is forward. Before you are the Clockwork Gauntlets, gloves that allow you remotely operate the powered gears that run the station. You point your gloves at a gear-lock on the door in front of you, the gear spins, and the door springs open. As you move on, you find your way back to the control room, restarting and powering bits of machinery along the way to proceed. Once you are back at the control room, however, panels show you that the ship has been seriously damaged. The engine rooms, life support rooms, and residential areas have all been compromised in some way. Looking at your new Gauntlets, you take it upon yourself to venture into the deep depths of the ship, beyond where any posh citizen has gone, to repair the ship yourself and find the captain-mayor.

During your initial repairs, you learn how to use your new gear abilities to lift and slide platforms, operate and repair broken machinery, dismantle obstacles and unlock doors.

Early in your adventure, you encounter the source of the colony's troubles, the Clockwork Zombies. These mindless mechanical contraptions stumble around aimlessly like ordinary zombies, except they are the remains of broken and dilapidated robots, gears exposed and wires sparking. Having crashed on the ship attempting to seize control, they now wander throughout the ship causing damage and being a nuisance. Eliminating these zombies is the key to ridding the ship of its problems.

Concept

Benjamin Salisbury and the Clockwork Zombies puts a new spin on the platformer genre by giving the player direct control over their environments in order to solve the puzzles that they are confronted with.

Mechanical devices are fascinating to a large number of people, yet there seems to be a lack of games in the market that utilize this mechanic. Some games, such as The Incredible Machine allow for the building a device that you set up and run in order to solve a puzzle. Other simple flash games have some clock-like mechanics, but it usually deals with simply fixing the device. In all other cases, the player is not directly controlling the device as they will in our game.

The mechanical devices in the game Cogs are a good source of inspiration for the machinery puzzles that we will use in Clockwork Zombies. Piping steam to power engines, sliding gears to mesh teeth properly and in the right order, and completing large scale contraptions to accomplish a task, etc.

Broad Mechanics

Benjamin Salisbury and the Clockwork Zombie's game play focuses on watchmaker Benjamin's ability to control powered gears though his Clockwork Gauntlets. Initially, Benjamin is only able to select and work with preexisting gears in each level, controlling their rotation in order to solve puzzles and progress through the game Powered gears can manipulate the environment by raising and lowering platforms, sweeping beams into enemies, disassembling and reassembling machinery, or moving other objects around the room. Powered gears may also affect multiple objects in the level through a series of other connected gears, yielding potentially undesirable results to the player.

After learning the basic mechanics of gear manipulation, a new concept is introduced: the ability to place your own powered gears. The player will pull out new gears to place in the environment in order to solve increasingly more complex puzzles.

The player is only able to have analog control over two powered gears at any time. Throughout the game, the player will have to defend himself from the Clockwork Zombies: unintelligent mechanical zombies who only serve to cause trouble. If attacked by the Clockwork Zombies, the player takes damage. After several consecutive hits, the player will be knocked unconscious and have to start the level over. After the player avoid hits for a period of time, health will quickly regenerate over a few seconds.

Players will encounter a new concept to apply their abilities to in each level, whether it is a new mental puzzle in the form of a large, broken machine, a new platforming challenge, or a giant clockwork zombie boss with unique weak points.