Really stuck in a creativity problem at the moment. I'm trying to lay out the designs for at least the first dungeon in the game, the one in the past- a castle, filled with traps, etc. But as there are only three dungeons planned, I want each one to have strong theme, a dungeon gimmick. I've already decided dungeon #2; it will have some sort of switch or lever that lets you rotate it by 90 degrees in any direction, spinning the entire dungeon- which will make for all sorts of fun puzzles, traps, and backtracking. But that will be the second dungeon I work on, and I've got to figure out the first one first.
I've already got most of what I'll be adding into it done in the actors- enemies and physics and some tilesets and only a few traps. But I'd like to come up with a good theme. So far, the best gimmick I've drummed up is having some sort of switch that reverses time for all the traps and platforms in the dungeon- fireballs shoot backwards into traps that would normally shoot them out, blades spin backwards, etc. But to me, it seems a really uninspired mechanic. Its the sort of thing thats been done many times, and theres very little room for differentiating traps that "run backwards in time" versus "run backwards"- like flipping the direction of a conveyer belt, thats done to death. But at the same time, its not feasible to have enemies "go backwards in time", as I've already finished all the enemies and logically theres no good way to do that- I could save positions/animations/etc to an array, loop it somehow, and pull from that, but I'd have to record every single enemy, it wouldn't work for more complicated ones like the goat shade shooting lightning arcs, and you definitely wouldn't be able to show enemies switching from current position to being pegged to an array, so it would have to always have them offscreen anyways. So I'd have to exclude enemies from the time effect, so all it would do is reverse the traps. Not especially awesome, not compared to gimmicks of rotating the entire dungeon, watching crates tumble and fall, seeing lava pouring from the ceiling, etc- using tricks I've already got planned.
So I'm still stuck for a bit, trying to figure out the mechanics, and popping off a few more enemies in the meantime. Completely finished enemies for the Past & Future now, just the 'present' ones left. Been reading up on every single level of zelda, mario, etc ever made, in order to come up with ideas for a gimmick
One gimmick I thought was amazing was from Skyward Sword that just came out. I didn't even know it when I played through the first time, but apparently the entire Ancient Cistern dungeon is based off a quite literal representation of a famous buddhist story of buddha lowering a silk spider thread into the underworld
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Pixelthief 
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