Game Vision Statement: Single Saviour

Image from Flickr

Introduction

Single Saviour is a first-person fighting game for the PC that uses the Unity engine to place the player  into the role of a young boy in medieval times battling his way through monstrous beast in order to find the source of these creatures and stop them from tormenting his village.

Description

You are a young peasant boy from a small village that has been tormented by monsters for as long as you've lived, tired of seeing the people of your village living in fear you decide to venture out into the woods surrounding your village and find the source of these terrible beasts with the small sword you got from your father and the support of the village members.

Along the way you see and defeat many strange and terrifying creatures, when they are slain you realise you can take their weapons or anything else that they may have from them and use it to your own advantage.Many of their weapons have added strengths to them, such as extra sharpness or poison on the blade. You then use these weapons to defeat even stronger beasts as you advance into the forest, following the path of destruction they left behind, you hope it will lead you to the source of these monsters so that you can stop it and save the village you grew up in.

As you follow this path and slay these creatures you find yourself becoming stronger and you also begin to notice a pattern in the behaviour of the monsters. Some of them seem to be afraid of certain things, you're sure of it, if you can figure out what each monster is afraid of maybe you can use it against them. You figure out that some of the weapons you've gathered seem to harm some of the monsters more than other weapons.

After following the path and making surviving the onslaught of beast it leads you eventually to a large cave in the side of a mountain, you hope that the source of these creatures in the cave and that you have become strong enough to destroy it, whatever it is.

In order to make this game I will be using the Unity engine and because I am still new to this engine I will need to use tutorials to figure out how to create the monsters and the AI for said monsters in the game. Luckily there are many tutorials out there for the Unity engine, on youtube like this one which I found very informative and even on the official Unity website here. Unity also has an assets store that you can download creatures models from but you do have to pay for them and there are tutorials teach you how to create free models. I will also be using the Jimmy Vegas tutorials that I have been writing posts about for the past few weeks in order create the terrain and some of the script.

Key Features

I hope for this game to have:
-Open world exploring
-Multiple monster designs
-One on one combat
-Weapon upgrades
-Level ups

Genre

This game is a 3D adventure, first-person fighting game similar to the game Zelda but a lot more simplified. The game will be set in medieval fantasy times in an alternate reality where monsters exist.

Platform

I think the game and its mechanics would be best suited to the PC platform.

Target Audience 

The target audience for this game would be teenagers from the ages 14 onwards.

My First Game Design: Unity Tutorial 03

Gif from Wikimedia Commons

The tutorial this week was not a continuation of the video tutorials we had been using the past few weeks but it was instead a written tutorial on how to build a moving clock in Unity. This tutorial goes over many things that we have already learned form the first few video tutorials that we've seen, the main difference in this tutorial is the coding that it goes over.

The first half of the tutorial showed us how to add objects into the scene and how to manipulate them into the clock face and other extremities which we already knew how to do from previous weeks. I did this by placing the objects and setting the scale of them to the specifications of the tutorial.

Later in the tutorial it explains how to rotate objects on the clock face along the Y axis 30 degrees and  use this to create the hour indicators on the clock face. To create the arms of the clock we can use the same approach and at the end of that we have our finished clock face, next we're shown how to animate the clock.

This were the tutorial goes in depth into the code that makes the clock work. The tutorial shows how to use C# script to make the arms of the clock move around the clock face and how to make the clock tell the time, though the coding can get quite complicated, going into things like floating-point values,  I managed to complete the clock and make it work. I thought this tutorial explained how to create a C# script and code the clock very well.

Games GDD

Image from Flickr

Games are very different to books or television shows because the consumption of games is unpredictable in comparison to the consumption of books and television shows. MDA breaks down this consumption of games into their components, rules, system and "fun" and their counterparts, mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics. This article explains that designers and the players both have a different views on these components and it is important when designing a game to take in both perspectives.

Aesthetics is all about what makes a game "fun". When describing a game it's best not to use that word and instead use more directed vocabulary. Sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery, expression and submission are several words that can be used to describe a game. For example The Sims would be described using the words, discovery, fantasy, expression and narrative.
This vocabulary helps to define models for gameplay which help describe gameplay dynamic and mechanics.

Dynamics work to create aesthetic experiences, an example of this is challenge which is created by things like time pressure and opponent play. Using monopoly as an example we can make our discussion of dynamics as concrete as possible. In monopoly as the leaders become more wealthy it has more negative effects on the other players. As this continues the dramatic tension and agency disappear and the players who are not in the lead lose interest. Using aesthetics and dynamics we can come up with ways to keep these players interested, maybe rewarding the players that are behind or giving the player in the lead more obstacles.

Mechanics are the actions, behaviours and control mechanisms that players have in the game. This combined with the  games content, the mechanics support overall gameplay dynamics. Adjusting those mechanics can help to fine tune a games overall dynamics. Lets use our monopoly example again. Applying changes such as bonuses for poorer players or penalties for richer players could keep the players behind the leader interested for longer.

Moving between these three parts of MDA helps us to develop techniques for iterative design and improvement and help to control undesired outcomes.