Monday, September 5, 2016

Senior Game Development Blog Week 1


This week was the Idea Brainstorming, where everybody on the team had to come up with numerous game ideas. Then, as a team, we narrowed the ideas down to three. It didn't matter what role you were originally because everybody was a designer this week.


The game ideas I came up with were obtained by just letting my mind wonder. Since I do this by just writing down whatever comes to mind, some of the ideas are not the best. I came up with Moose Dating Simulator and “Bird Simulator”. The idea for “Bird Simulator” was that you play as a bird and just defecate on stuff. I don't remember where and why I thought of a moose dating sim, but I must have thought of it during summer break. I probably thought of bird simulator because a bird defecated on either my car or my coworkers clean car. The idea for the moose sim was probably the one that we would ignore, as a team. While we talked about the bird simulator idea, we agreed that it would have probably been a fun game to play for like ten minutes, so we decided against that one too.


Another game that I thought up during summer was Hitman-style dentist game. I was at the dentist getting my teeth cleaned when I thought of this idea. In this game, you play as a dentist and you have to kill your patient, who happens to be a criminal. So there are multiple ways you can kill him, you can poison your dental picks and just make contact with his blood or give him a too much of a sleeping agent so he falls asleep while driving.


A serious game that I thought of during summer was a racing game, where you play as a grandma on a scooter and you race people in the mall. You have to get that last sale item before another racing at a speed slightly faster than walking. The team liked this idea but we felt like it was too complicated to make, we needed a functioning mall, animations for the racers and npcs, and we need to have AI for the other racers.



I seem to be good at coming up with a starting idea, so I came up with some game mechanics that needed help to become a full game. One idea is that you are a clone that goes rogue and you have to kill other clones. Connor, my designer, said the enemies will copy your upgrades, which made the initial idea even better. I also came up with a music based mechanic where you can control music so that when you slow down music everything is slowed down and then you can speed up the music and everything speeds up. This would include attack power and jumping distance to name a few examples. While thinking about writing this blog post I thought of another music power. Reversing the song will reverse time, but that is too similar to the game Braid.



While my artist, designer, and I were walking down to our meeting place, we passed by an old lady driving and she asked for directions to the hospital, so I said that we should make a game where you  give out directions. We were discussing a "Keep talking and Nobody Explodes" game but with driving. One person has the directions and has to lead the driver to the destination within the time limit. Another idea I had was anti-co-op game. I saw a sticker that said "Coop" and I said "Let's make a co-op game where you kill each other". we talked about that game idea but the designer was confused by my wording.



Once we got to the meeting place, we discussed what games we thought would be the best to present to the class.  We went through all the ideas that we thought of, some games were easy to throw out such as my simulator games. Once we got to four games, it became hard to pick the best three. The first game we picked was a child of light styled exploration game with puzzle elements and combat where you can combine powers to create more powers. The second game is a reverse stealth game where you are the diversion for the actual spy. The third idea is the rogue clone game with a music mechanic where you kill enemies to fill a music meter.