What Do You Think

...about the basic gameplay mechanics, as outlined?

The goal is to get through the level and beat the "boss." To progress past certain points in the level (or to make certain areas easier) you need to clear rooms full of dead bodies with the "collect body part with vacuum, fire it out of cannon at matching body parts" system (while fighting zombies that form from groups of parts that lying on the ground, as well as spawn on their own) and collect different "key items."

Certain key items must be picked up (and delivered?) by hand, which adds another layer of strategy: setting up a defense with your carriage's parts (lights and machine gun nests) before exiting to pick up an item or wounded character or whatever.

Physics system also adds another level of gameplay: physical puzzles. These could be as simple as a stack of coffins in your way (which must be plowed), or as complex as a boss fight (the Great Grand Intestine Dragaeon must be knocked unconscious so that you may enter his maw and travel down his guts to whatever is making him go crazy)(=need to hit some boulders suspended above him with cannon fire while avoiding his attacks).

This game will be about putting the player into the world through the use of art, lighting, ambient sound, physics, setting, and story. It'll be an epic journey, homes.


...Right. So specifically: What do you think about the "I pick up an arm, the arm shows up as an icon in the fuel tank, then I fire the arm from the cannon at a group of arms above, which explode and send more dead bits down from the ceiling" mechanic? That is the one I'm not certain about... Other ideas:
1. The arm (and any other part) could just supply a set amount of fuel, which can be used to fire your cannon or move your carriage (this could lead to "out of gas" scenarios, where the player is forced to leave his carriage behind for a long time to go get some fuel... but if you like that scenario, we could put it in with scripting as part of the story and still maintain the "Icon" mechanic). To do this one, we need to figure out how to show different fuel levels in the fuel tank.
2. There only full bodies stuck in the ceiling, but the different bodies and zombies are different colors. Vacuuming up a certain color dead body will make the fuel tank glow that color, and that is the next color the cannon fires. You match colors instead of parts up above. With this one, we could still have set amounts of fuel, which we'd need to show, but we'd also need to figure out how to make the fuel tank glow, etc.
Also, what would separate bodies from zombies? Perhaps just a set amount of time, and then the body becomes a zombie? Or maybe the zombies are their own color- so you can tell which ones will turn into zombies when they hit the ground- but when sucked into the fuel tank, they give you a "bad shot" which infects any bodies caught in the explosion with the zombie curse. This takes away one obstacle (not knowing which bodies will turn into zombies you need to defend your vessel from) but adds another (can't risk picking up zombies with the vacuum).
There are other ways we could approach this, too- it's our main gameplay mechanic, and we could go pretty much anywhere with it. Maybe you need to purchase ammo for the cannon with money found amongst the corpses (so conserving cannon fire becomes as important as firing the cannon quickly, precisely, and strategically). Whatever we pick will have a heavy impact on how the game feels and how the other gameplay mechanics function...

So we should vote on it.
Once everyone gives their opinion and thoughts, that is.