In class we had the task recently to make a game as a group using unity. We came up with a game idea including lots of inside jokes and after a while when we were told we would be pitching it i thought the game needs to be changed to be a bit more appealing to an audiance rather then a game of inside jokes. I had a brief chat with some team members over text messages and we decided it would be good to change. I said to the group i would write up design ideas of everything needed for the game in a google doc on my teams shared drive , below i have pasted what i wrote in the google doc for my team. This google doc is going to be reviewed tomorrow morning by the group and we will be having a meeting to see what is needed to change and what can be kept / salvaged to make a good game. I am happy with the decision made and hope that our game will end out good. We were told we had to answer questions when writing these blogs so here we go : What are you happy abour ? I am happy with the progress of our team and think we work well together. What are you good at ? I think i am good at leading the team along with helping it run well and making sure we are organised and everyone has jobs/knows what to do. How could your work be improved ? I think this goes for the full team when i say this , i think the full team could improve by doing more work at home instead of just when we are together during the day (monday to wednesday). What do you need to do to improve it ? As i am leader of the group i am going to encourage the group members to do individual work to help out with the game development in there own time at home. How is your teamwork ? Amazing , we work really well together. How good is your team communication ? i think it is great also we have a group facebook chat that we talk in about the game as well as a linked drive to pass things around and we also talk all the time outside of our chat. How is the teams ability to give and recieve feedback? All members of the team are good at taking advice and applying it to there work , all members are also just as good at giving tips and good at helping out in general. How good is the teams time management ? We have not really set time boundaries for tasks until last time we were together i started to get down to setting a deadline for things so we can speed up development , it worked well so i will be doing it allot more in the future to make sure we get tasks done faster. As mentioned below is the google doc contents :
Old Game idea :
Caitlin was shrunk down my the evil kieran and had to kill chickens and find her way around the level to get to cages with classmates stuck in them to receive objects to help beat the boss kieran. There would be power ups spread throughout the level that would give abilities to speed the character up this would be a can of coke or cup of coffee . The chickens were the enemies and when they are killed they would drop a chicken nugget , this would store a part of your life. The chickens when they die would also have a rare chance to drop a weapon.
New Game Idea :
Storyline :
The character is a nextgen student and tries so hard to make a game really “come to life” and something goes wrong within the code and actually makes the game come to life dragging the character in with it as well. The character is shrunk down small and is suddenly able to jump high. The character finds him/herself under the classroom table and notices a wave of their game enemies flying out of the monitor and suddenly figures out the risk of what is happening.
Goal :
The goal of the game is to survive while collecting powerups to gain powers , collect weapons to help you survive the waves of enemies filling up the classroom. You have to find parts of your games code around the room to and return them to the main pc to fix your game and return you back to your normal size and destroy all the enemies you created.
Powerups:
Powerups can consist of :
An energy drink , this can increase your movement speed , this involves your running , walking and jumping.
Another power up can be something (item not decided) that makes your weapon better , whether this is making your raygun have unlimited ammo or whether it increases damage.
You could finally have some sort of tablet of some sort that makes you take less damage.
You could finally have a powerup which is spring boots which increases your jump height for a set amount of time.
Weapons :
Weapons will consist of anything from a raygun to a melee weapon like a sword.
There should be a range of weapons both melee and ranged. Some ideas that i have thought of could be :
Raygun , sword of some sort , normal gun that shoots some sort of like tetris blocks and a weapon like a spear or javelin. There can be many more ideas of weapons but i think a few to start off are good , the weapons could be acquired by breaking stuff open to find them around the room.
Enemies :
Enemies should be sprite based and simple pixel design , these should be based around retro kind of enemies and characters like the film pixels which has pac man and many other old retro characters in it. These will be things that can most likely fly/hover so animations are not needed for walking and they can just glide across the room. The enemies can both fire at you and some can just kill you upon colliding with them .
Level Design :
The level will just be the classroom as it both links in with the story and also is partly finished already for the previous game idea we had. We will have to use obstacles that we can climb up like placeable ladders or something like ropes to help us scale up , down and over objects to help navigate around the room from high objects down to low and the over way around. we will have to fill the room with computer related objects like USB sticks etc just to clutter the desks a bit more and the floors just to make it look more populated and not so empty spaced.
Name :
The name of the game has not been decided however i believe that a good name could be something relating to the story like “ A Nextgen Reality” because this shows that its next gen and a then links to the idea of it being a reality. All ideas are good.
Intro / Cutscene :
You always need a start to a game to explain the story and the objective/what is going on and how you got there. Instead of doing some sort of action scene i think we should have a simple cartoon strip of a person making a game at a desk and then the computer starts glowing and then the character gets thrown backwards in his/her chair away from the desk and gets shrunk as a wave of enemies start flying out the screen . Then the final image can be them flying towards him/her. Then it swaps into the game and a text box comes up at the bottom of the screen explaining controls and objective of what you have to do.
Character :
The character does not need allot of detail put into it apart from for the comic strip this means no modeling of the character will need to be done as it will be in first person and you wont seen the body of the character.
Sounds :
For sounds , i know we sent a list away to the music students. The list we sent is pretty much still needed and can be used apart from the chickens, any other sound effects we could need we can make or find non copyrighted samples on the internet to use.
John Romero: Doom and Quake lead designer and level designer, Daikatana producer, co-founder of id Software, Ion Storm, Loot Drop, and Monkeystone Games
nextgennathan 