As you might know reading my tweets, in my upcoming game Vera Blanc: Fullmoon I am going to have LOTs of “minigames”. They became very popular recently, especially on casual games portals, so I decided to give it a try too. I must admit they work very well to increase the replayability and the immersion of the game.

Now you could rightly ask me: how does a “memory game” or a “find the differences” does help the game’s atmosphere/immersivity ?! Well, I’m going to show you two examples.
Check the image on the left: it’s one of the “find the differences” minigames. In this case we’re in a wood nearby the main town of Wolfach (it will be an imaginary town even if I know probably such a name exist for real).

We’re looking for clues. So, such a minigame can help because the player will feel like if he’s searching the surrounding, trying to spot any detail can help in the investigation.

That’s what the real detectives do: look around to see anything that can catch their attention, even really small details like in this minigame.

Now for the other example, I’ll show you a youtube video:

This is an “action scene”. The player must run away from an ominous big man who’s chasing Vera for some reason. For this scene I thought would have been much better to use something like that – I even thought about a real-time sequence but probably would have been too difficult. However there is a real-time minigame already, but don’t want to talk about it because would be a spoiler for the story 🙂

I believe the minigame above with the music and the images represent well one of those scenes typical of the action-movies, helps player immersion and I think is also fun to play 🙂

I have now reached the point where the demo would end, and I’m starting the rest of the game. The art is almost completely done, so my aim is to finish the game, at least the beta version, by end of this month, even if I know it won’t be easy!