The Brief

Morph (to transform or be transformed completely in appearance or character)

The Elementals development team consists of me (Becky Veater), Christian Cook, and Paul Bird.
The first thing we did was to consider the different elements of a game that could be morphed or transformed:

• Character - scale, skills
• Environment - backgrounds, level objects
• Time
• Space - viewport
• Controls (interface)
• Sound

Then from this list we began developing a list game ideas that could utilise one or more of these elements in connection with morphing or transforming.  The following is a rough list of ideas that we had for this topic:

• Rolling panda - but eating or not eating food a panda gets fatter or thinner to enable completion of levels
• sliding between dimensions, inspired by the megiakure example in my dissertation research amongst others, although there is debate over whether this is truly morphing, or whether it is purely transformational.
• morphing viewport - stay in the light, use torches to keep light/increase light to complete levels.  Again there is an issue here as to matching the brief as the viewport is not seen as a viewport to the player, more an element of the environment (light/space) of the game which would again point to transformation or change but not morphing.
• character shapes tall man and fat man multiplayer, use both characters to get the characters to the end of the level

We have also collected a few examples of games that use sorts of morphing techniques.  The apple app Contre Jour is an example of environmental morphing:

Many popular games already include character morphing. Take Mario for example, in Super Mario Bros DS Mario can collect items to make himself bigger, smaller, protected, and armed, covering both physical and skill based morphing, some of which are shown here:

My previous dissertation research in which I talked about Braid demonstrates a morphing/transformation of time:

These are just a few of the many games that involve morphing to some extent.  The trick now is to take examples we have seen and the ideas we have had and create a unique and exiting gameplay experience which we can the use for the game jam.