Senior Production
Post I
One of the integral parts of my Capstone class is working with a team to create a game. Assuming we decide to challenge enough stages and make it through the cut this winter, this will become a 2 semester long project. This blog, beginning with this post, will try to elaborate on some of the things we will be working on, my thoughts on various things and just the process of making our game. In the future, it is likely I will be posting content such as images, videos or perhaps some code but for this first post, it will lie mainly in the realm of text. There is a TL;DR at the bottom for those who prefer it.
Like everything, this game will have to start somewhere and the first place for us to begin is with the ideas we have brainstormed. The class requires us to have at least 20 ideas (they don’t need to be thought out) and the idea behind this is to get us thinking and to explore our options before settling. I don’t have intentions of posting this list here, but I would like to talk about a few of the more notable ones and my thoughts on it.
The first thing we talked about and the thing we were originally excited for was a Tower Defense. Having talked briefly over the summer with my team, we knew our interests lay in a more strategy oriented game. We started brainstorming with a tower defense game and ended with 3 different takes on it. While we could theoretically take any of these aspects and apply it to each of the other ideas (or even merge it all into one game), they are fundamentally different. The idea I brought up was a casual competitive take on the traditional gameplay by turning it into a game that two players play against each other. Players would be playing in a round based system (where actions such as building towers could only be down between rounds) and the object was to get as many of your troops through the enemy defenses. Other mechanics such as abilities, wave organization and more would be in place to allow each player control over the process. Victory was also determined by who won the most rounds rather than who was last standing. This meant that each round could be wildly different since each round was like having a fresh start. Other interesting mechanics brought up by the other 2 variations were the use of environment (such as weather) to affect gameplay and a blend of 2D and 3D mechanics that would make it a battle in both a 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional plane at the same time.
Moving forward a bit, we also had an idea for a dungeon crawler. This also had slight variations, but the basic idea was the same. It was intended as a couch co-op game with multiple players playing together and working together to get through a dungeon of monsters. One of the ideas focused around having roles and the use of teamwork to survive while another focused around two or more players controlling a singular character. Either way, it was sure to be an interesting idea to see to fruition.
Since our session was open to any idea, one of the things that was brought up was a horror game. Now, I’m not usually a fan of this genre, but some of the ideas being thrown around really got me thinking. The biggest of these ideas was the use of sound to help the user find their way around a dark space. This as well as using light as a mechanic for gameplay (such as a monster which only moves in the shadows) would make for a really interesting game. We have come back several times to this idea since the initial brainstorming and the more we talk about it, the more interesting and appealing this idea becomes. I am, however, slightly concerned about the scope of this idea so this will need to be something we tackle early should we move forward with it.
One of the more innovative ideas we came up with was intended to use a peripheral (such as a phone) as the main controller for the game. The idea which sticks out the most is a Cooking Simulator. Rather than abstracting the process of cooking into little minigames like a lot of other cooking games have down, this was intended to be a simulation of cooking. The game would use the phone as a means of navigating the work stations and selecting tools. The hardware on the phone (such as accelerometer and gyroscope) would be used as input for the game which interpret the action based on the context. This game is also ambitious in a different way because the point was to get the user to create a dish and they would be rated on how they did. An example could be making a steak dinner and they would have to tenderize the meat, season it, cook it on the stove or BBQ to the desired temperature and prepare vegetables and other sides with it. Everything you would do in real life to prepare a meal would have to be done in the game. This game has a lot of potential walls to climb over should it go forward, but it is definitely something that would be fun to see to completion.
The last idea I will talk about is one that kind of sprung up out of the blue. Typically, our ideas would be a genre or a specific take on a genre (such as Cooking Sim or 2D/3D Tower Defense), but this one started off as a bad joke. We initially put up the words “Balls Revolution” with no idea what it actually would be. One can only assume we meant a ball rolling game, a classic amongst champlain game students. We later jokingly changed the name to Balls Balls Revolution as a playful stab at Dance Dance Revolution and how it is redundant in its name. But when I posed a question to my team asking what we think this game would be, a great idea was formed. On our list of ideas, we had bullet hell listed. This was meant to signify that we could make a generic bullet hell game. Then someone brought up the idea of combining the 2D/3D mix we liked from the tower defense idea and putting it in the bullet hell game. This would mean you would play in either a 2D or 3D space and that everything you did in either dimension would have an equivalent in the other dimension. So for example, fighting a boss in 3D could have a part which is impossible in that dimension, so you would swap to 2D mid fight and fight the equivalent boss at that particular time frame and this would be a important mechanic in the game. Lastly, we tried to figure out how to tie this idea to the name. One of us had the idea of putting a ball game spin to it where the player is a spherical object (perhaps a ship or something of the sort) that was fighting a race of sided objects. Perhaps even the number of sides on the enemy could signify its difficulty. This in particular is my favorite and I would love to see this through to completion.
Looking forward, i’m sure this will be an interesting semester and I have high hopes and aspirations for what my team and I can accomplish together.
TL;DR:
- We brainstormed ideas
- Tower Defenses! (Maybe 2D/3D twist on it?)
- Co-Op Dungeon Crawler
- Horror game
- Cooking Sim 2015
- Balls Balls Revolution
- I like Balls Balls Revolution the most