In class we started off by creating a mood board of all of the different things which make us personally feel a specific way and then expanded from there to create a big group board filled with different emotions and ideas on what we would want to see in a game, we then each picked a noun, an adjective and a verb from the classes collective board and made ideas based on these 3, I chose 2 players, being unpredictable and aggressiveness/ voilence.
In class on friday we then did a nodenoggin for each of our presentations we made for our 3 ideas (shown below) and this was my feedback:
From this I chose to develop idea 3 further since it was also a personal idea which I have liked for a while.
When coming up with ideas for the project this was my first idea:
The art style of RainWorld and First Light drew me in initially to this specific type of game since I think the style fits in best with what I am trying to achieve for this design, the focus would be on the aesthetics and puzzle solving elements of the game rather then the story of it to keep the scope simplified and easy to develop since we are aiming for between 3-5 hours play time. To allow more time to be spent on how it would look puzzles could be implemented through simple button pushes or parkour when the character has to overcome a particularly difficult jump or push a block just about into the right position.
The 2nd character would be a shadow, I would implement them by putting objects in the foreground and adding a ‘spotlight’ which would shine down onto the character and create blocks which the shadows can jump onto or interact with in the seperate realm. The shadows would be the obstacles and the player who is playing as the shadow will be a replica of the chadacter but be able to jump on them rather then the static scenery, so things like normal ground they would fall through unless they specifically have a shadow below it.
This was my 2nd idea for what I could design a game on:
For the 2nd idea I wanted to explore the idea of 2 players but only at certain point in the story or the idea of them working against eachother. e.g., If one player was playing as a mouse and another as a bear then if they got too close then bear would eat the mouse and loose sight of the objective, or one player as a human and another as their soul and if the soul strays too far from the human they both die or stay perminantly seperated. The soul could also be explored into more depth by adding a function that if they stray too far away one gets demobalized and then if they continue beyond this point then they die.
This idea out of all of the options was my least favourite because the scope and ideas of which could come from this type of mechanic was too large and with the art style I chose it would be difficult to convey the effect I would want to given the time we will also have to develop it. These type of multiplayer games often take a long time to troubleshoot, develop and the end result is often far from what they wanted in the begining which is not something which i could commit to at this stage.
The final idea I came up with was based more on personal interest in this type of game rathet then the class exercise:
This final idea was the favourite as found out on Friday during our Crit presentation (shown above), people found that thy most enjoyed the idea of a cat roaming around a post apocolyptic world avoiding the light because its deadly to the cat and also linking back to the idea with shadows except this time rather then using them as guiding obstacles. The light is supposed to represent death because it kills the cat but also sometimes in the game I want to give the player the choice to have to take a more risky route and getting higher rewards or a concept of being left out if you stay in the dark both physically and mentally. This could referance to not knowing things or following trends and the idea of staying in the dark mentally in a way of intentionally avoiding information or things which could harm you just because you are comfortable in your current environment.
In terms of development, the scope on this game is quite small so it would be easy to develop, I would want it to focus around story and aesthetic more then I would have complex mechanics so in this case I would prpobably only opt for a simple run, jump and 1 key to interact in terms of controls to keep it simple. This is the idea at this stage which I would like to take forward but might change over time to better fit the concept and design of the game.