Games Design (Unit 65): UNIT 65 GROUP P1

Market Research

Games Ideas Pitch

Breaking Down Games

Design Values/ Theme:

The theme is made up of three sections to consider:

Aesthetics
- Visuals
- Lore

Systems
- Subsystems
- Components

Mechanics
- Challenges
- Progression
- Verbs

A game could also be broken down into 8 questions:

Experience -
What does the player do when playing?
Theme -
What is the game about?
Point Of View -
What does the player hear, see or feel?
Challenge -
What constraints does the game present?
Decision Making -
How and where does the player make decisions?
Skill/ Strategy/ Chance/ Uncertainty -
Which one of these factors does the game utilise?
Content -
Where and why does the player play the game?
Emotions -
What emotions do the game induce?

Lets answer these questions for one of the first games every made - Pong

Experience -
The player has the ability to move a paddle up or down. They do this to stop a ball passing by them, which is considered the failure state.
Theme -
Its about competition and the results of competition
Point Of View -
The player sees the game from a top down perspective. The objects in the game are represented with lines and dots; the paddle and tennis net are lines while the ping pong ball is a dot. every object is white against a black background
Challenge -
The paddle the player operates can only move at a certain speed, requiring them to predict where the pong ball will be when the paddle needs to hit it.
Decision Making -
They decide whether to move or not, and the direction of which they move
Skill/ Strategy/ Chance/ Uncertainty -
The game is too fast paced to focus on strategy, making Skill the defining factor of the game. Chance is also a small factor; as there is no way to predict where the ball starts or who would serve first.
Content -
Pong was usually experienced first in arcades and then in living rooms on the Atari console. The player would play with someone else, usually someone they know, and compete with them.
Emotions -
The game induces stress as the players get more and more invested on winning as the game goes on and therefore more and more concerned that they do indeed win. The game gives feelings of success or failure depending on the outcome of the game.

Since its a game that might possibly relate to the future project, the second game I will be breaking down will be 'Fran Bow'

[it didn't end up that way]

Experience -
The player is capable of moving around rooms, switching the room they are in by interacting with the environment, and interacting with objects or people in their environment by clicking on them, usually prompting a comment by Fran. Click-able objects are highlighted with a cursor change. The player can access their inventory to use, combine or examine items they have collected from the environment, and they can use medication to change the environment they are in (its a duel worlds mechanic that alternates each environment into one of two possibilities, the drugged up one and the regular one).

Theme -
The game is about how we deal with trauma, as well as how a child sees the world they are in (especially in relation to imagination)
Point Of View -
The player sees a side on view of the environment they are in, and cannot move the camera perspective at all. The sides of the screen is faded to black. Objects or characters in the environment, including Fran herself who is controlled by the player, can have animations as well. The sound design is lonely but not empty. There is non-diagetic ambience going on in the background and characters voice quiet gibberish when dialogue is playing. When the medication is used, there is a loud, building sound like a train coming into a station, and a softer sound is played when the player disables the medication. When medication is being used, the mouse cursor is less responsive and more sluggish, creating a different feel between the worlds.

An example of a view with and without medication -

Challenge -
Progression is blocked until certain actions are performed by the player character. They must use their ability to interact with the environment, as well as the objects in their inventory, to problem solve to allow progression. One example would be when a child withholds an item until the player brings them 'A castle and a horse'. The player can find paper and a crayon in the next room, and can combine them to draw a castle and horse, give it to the child, and receive the item.

Decision Making -
Decisions include where to go, whether to be in medicated vision or not, and what items to use, combine or examine. There is also how the player uses these items with the environments around them to give birth to progress. There are also one of two dialogue options to pick when talking to people, though this is usually a 'continue' or 'shut up I clicked you on accident oh god why' options.

Skill/ Strategy/ Chance/ Uncertainty -
The game is an adventure puzzle game, which focuses on the skill of being able to solve the puzzles and allow further progression. The game is entirely consistent, featuring no chance or uncertain elements to it. There is strategy as to how you go about searching environments, but these are rare.

Content -
The game is available on steam and is likely to be played alone as it features no multiplayer elements or interactions. It is likely to be played at home on a desktop PC (there is no console version available). The player plays the game in order to learn more of the story, to have a feeling of accomplishment over solving the puzzles, and to be scared by the horror aspects of the game.

Emotions -
Being primarily a horror game, the game mainly induces feelings of dread and fear. The game doesn't ever startle; instead focusing on the fear that comes from the uncanny; that feeling that something is different or off in ways that unhinge us. The game also gives levity in the feelings of accomplishment from solving puzzles, and the intrigue of the story as it unfolds to the player

And for the game that my group will be producing: Survival Instinct

Experience -
The player moves around a 2D plane. They can move left, right, and can jump up or fall down. They can shoot in the cardinal directions by aiming and then firing. They need to eliminate enemies that slowly move in from both sides of the screen and avoid the enemies making direct contact with them else they would die. The player has 3 lives and when they run out, game over.

Theme -
At the bedrock level; the game is about the futility of survival. Try as you might to survive; the enemy numbers will just get higher and higher and higher until game over.

Point Of View -
The physical point of view for the player is a 2D side scroller view. The borders of the screen cannot be crossed and do not move, giving the player a full view of the map. The enemies move in from off screen and an indicator prompt will show when an enemy is about to enter from the side of the screen. The firearms and enemies themselves with have dietetic sound effects and the music would be quite heavy-metal inspired. When the player is on their last life, the music would change to something more somber.

Challenge -
The enemies can kill the player in one hit, meaning eliminating them or dodging them through jumping and platforming is a priority. They move slowly but as time passes the number of enemies that spawn in will steadily increase, with new types of enemies occurring more regularly as time goes on. This will leave the player in a constant state of threat, and gives them no opportunity to breathe.

Decision Making -
The player needs to decide on their own positioning in relation to the oncoming hordes in order to ensure their own survival. There will be purchasable upgrades that the player will need to decide on which can be gotten by using their score.

Skill/ Strategy/ Chance/ Uncertainty -
Skill would be the main deciding factor as the game is far too fast paced to allow for a focus on strategy. Chance and Uncertainty would also be factors that play in to the game as enemy spawns are random and whether that enemy will be a regular enemy or one of a variety of special enemies will be up to RNG.

Content -
Should the game be released, it would be an in-browser experience playable from any computer. Ideally, the game would be experienced at home on a regular PC. The game is single player but features a scoreboard element to it that marks players based off of their total score.

Emotions -
The main emotion the game would induce would be stress. This is due to how the difficulty would ramp up and the player would be given no time to rest between assaults. As the player gets further and does better, the enemies they will face get harder to defeat, meaning stress would ramp up exponentially as the player tries to do better and better against growing odds of defeat.

Notes or ideas for survival instinct

- maybe a dead-cells or cuphead style of controls and gameplay elements would fit well
- having something the PC needs to protect from enemies might work a bit better than just dodging and shooting. It would give less chances to find exploits in the game or let the PC settle into a pattern of play. This thing that needs protecting could move around, to make the game more dynamic.
- maybe the side of the level can scroll a little, just to give the map more of a variety.
- purchasing powerups with score?
- if their score is also how they are rated on the top 10 lists, and is the rating of their skill, could score be used to purchase extra lives? should there be a limit on extra lives purchasable?

Game Inspiration -

Cuphead
Hotline Miami
Painkiller

Whats the key idea of the game? Zany, chaotic fun.

Mechanics that would support this:

The game will consist of 3 lanes. Zombies will come out of both sides of the screen to move across these three lanes, and the player can move between lanes and shoot the zombies to kill them. They all die in one hit. The zombies have no way to move between the lanes, and so zombies will assail the player from each of the three lanes.

In order to make sure the player doesn't just go complacent and stay one one lane - effectively cutting the enemies they have to be concerned about in three. To make sure the player keeps each lane clear and doesn't just stay where they are, there will be giant zombies. These guys will charge from one side of the screen quickly to the other, killing the player and sending them flying if they don't get out of the way in time. This will make sure the player has to keep more than one lane clear, so they they're not forced to jump into a lane that just kills them.

There's a power-up style mechanic in which enemies have a chance of dropping one of a pool of 20 powerups. The player won't really be able to remember which power-ups do what, so in order to make sure the game doesn't give the player a cheap death by what they thought was a machine gun rocket launcher turning out to be a baseball bat, every power-up will be a definitive improvement on the weapon the player uses. There will be no way in which any of the upgrades will be at all worse than the starting weapon: no weapon will have a lower fire rate, no weapon will have a lower range and so on. This will require the powerups to be incredibly powerful, but thats supports the zany feel we're going for.

Every five waves, there will be a boss fight. These boss fights will be randomised from a pool of about 5 bosses. When a boss is defeated, they will drop a power-up with an extended timer.