Prototype

 Prototype

This week I began my unity adventure which is putting what I have learned so far into practice. I created some basic objects that will be my player and my obstacles as well as my scene where all the action will take place. I then coloured them in and added some code to the player to give it some basic movement. My game is going to have a rise and fall mechanic for my player but as of yet it does not have this applied to it as I am still currently researching how to implement it. I have spent some time trying to find information on this and so far have not been able to find anything that coincides with what I am trying to achieve. I did however find a discord server that is for Unity beginners that is populated with tons of information about how to do things, hopefully this will help me as I feel a bit lost without the help of the tutorials if I'm being honest.

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Game Design Document

 GDD

This week I had to learn about and create my Game Design Document. To create my one I used Dundoc. Initially I had no clue what I was looking at when I first created my first project but as I played around with the elements I learned how to use them and what to add into them. You can view my document HERE!. This will be updated as time goes on and I figure out what content will be in my game as right now I am a little sceptical about what to include in case it my not be viable.

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Game Vision Statement

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 The Game (Space Ranger)

This side scrolling games called Space Escape is to be an exciting, edge of you seat , keep you on your toes action flying game where the user will try to achieve as high a score as possible in order to be named "The Best". It is an arcade style game that will have the user flying a space ship in a never ending map avoiding obstacles and shooting in order to progress. The game will feature a metre counter that will track the users play as he/she goes through the level. Upon a game over , the user will be given there score and will have to restart from the beginning and go again.

Starting off, you the player will start at a given speed, something easy to get you started. You will then have to begin traversing the level avoiding obstacles that are in your way, these obstacles will be stationary and you must control your ship and decide whether to go over or under them or even through them. There will be pickups that you will be able to get should you fly into them and these will grant you abilities such as slow the ship down(to make the game easier), pick up ammo for your ship that will allow you to destroy objects in your way and there will be pickups that have a negative effect on you too such as one that will speed your ship up(to make the game harder). The game itself is never ending, the only way it ends is if you hit one of the obstacles, resulting in a game over. You will keep going, all the while your distance is being tracked,, so If you want to get first place on the leader board, don't crash! The game will also feature nice visuals in terms of level design, it will not have to be too dynamic as the map is going to go on forever or at least until the player gets a game over, so the level itself can have maybe two or three different scenario's that can be repeated as the user goes forward. It will also have audio ques such as gun sounds, exploding sounds and a simple background tune that will play, It will also have a generic game over sound accompanied with a crash sound for when the user hits an object. 

To give you a better visual understanding of what it is I am looking to achieve, here are some images of who I see as our competitors. The first Image is of a game called Copter and the second one is of a game called Tiny Plane. In essence, the game I am looking to create is going to be a hybrid of these two games. Both game are incredibly fun and slightly addictive especially Copter which I have found myself playing numerous times over and over.

This game is classed as a side scrolling shooter/ flying game/ racing game and will be available to play on pc or laptop using a mouse and keyboard, It will primarily be a single player game but include a leader board where players can upload their final distance scores to compare against each other. It will have some simple mechanics at its core but promises to be a very fun and enjoyable experience, and one that the user can repeat over and over in order to beat their personal best.

 

some of the key features are listed here for you, I will try and explain them as best as I can and seeing that the game is still in early development, know that some of them may be subject to change.   

•  Rise and Fall - The user will be in a constant state of descending, unless the left mouse button is pressed and held which will give the ship the ability to ascend.
• Shooting - You will be in control of a spaceship that is capable of destroying objects that are in your way.
• Race - You are going to be racing against your own distance covered and other peoples distances, to see who is the best at the game.

Pickups - As you play through the level you will be able to collect certain powerups that will have a positive and negative effect on you, the positive ones will help you and the negative ones must be avoided or you will experience a negative effect.

To conclude, I am hoping to create this game to the best of my skills and provide people with a fun to play game that will keep them coming back for more and depending on the success of the game I would love to continue to add to it further down the line.

Game Idea Research

 My Idea

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When thinking about what game I was going to make I initially thought of a type of time trial game where the user has to complete some sort of race and achieve their best finish time. I want my game to be able to be played over and over and have the user wanting to better their score every time. I remember playing the last mission on a call of duty game more than 100 times because there was an achievement for completing the level in a certain time limit and no matter how much I hated that I couldn't achieve it I kept playing it, if you want an insight as to what I am talking about you can watch the quick video clip here. 

My point is that this kind of gameplay kept me coming back to better my time and I feel like it is a good hook that I can add to my game. I am going to create a side scrolling game where the user controls some sort of vehicle be it a plane or a car and has to traverse a course filled with obstacles in order to reach the finish line and be given a high score.

 1. The first game mechanic I research is going to be a Rising and Falling mechanic, you can read some more about it in the link provided. This mechanic will work for the player when they are trying to avoid obstacles on the course.

2. My second mechanic will be a timing mechanic. I plan on having the player be able to hit a powerup marker that will give a brief boost to their speed and help them finish faster, only if the hit it though.

3. For my third mechanic I would like to put in a resizing mechanic where the player would have to trigger something in order to resize the vehicle in order to fit through a part of the course, if the player does not get this "item" then it will result in a game over as they will not be able to progress further. I found this article that talks about my 2nd and 3rd game mechanic ideas to give you some insight as to what they are about and how they operate.

Game Brainstorm

 Calm Before The Brainstorm

Knowing that I am going to be making a game in Unity this semester was a shock to the system. Never had I imagined that I would be making a game on this course but I am actually looking forward to doing it and get some insight into the creative process that comes with it. Being a fan of video games for many years now I am hoping that my excessive up till all hours gaming sessions will have not been in vain and I can take some of what I think I know to be a good game into this task. In this post I will be talking about four games that I like and draw inspiration from when the time comes to make my own. I'm a huge fan of  sci-fi games and first person shooters but I don't think that I will be able to make a game of that magnitude just yet. I have a 10 year old nephew who is forever on his tablet playing video games that are of a much simpler concept such as temple run which I find oddly addictive, so I will be aiming to maybe make a game along those lines for my project. Anyway, here are my four games that I will be looking to for inspiration.

1. Copter

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Copter is a free to play arcade game that anyone can pick up and play. The concept is simple, get the helicopter as far as you can without it crashing. There is no end game to this as it just keeps going and going. The aim is for the user to try and set a high score then try to beat it again. The score is measured by the distance that you travel and as you can see from the picture it has a simple scoreboard, on the left it tells you how far you have gone in your current game while on the right it tells you your best all-time score. The controls could not be more easy to use, with the mechanics of the game constantly having the helicopter going down(crashing) and the only way to send it back up and keep it airborne is by left clicking and holding while letting go sends it back down, also there is no control over whether or not the user goes backwards or forward as the game is designed to only have the helicopter going in one direction. There are simple obstacles along the way that the user must avoid hitting or this will result in a game over. The level design and the object design in the game is fairly simple and looks like something that could be achievable with the skills I am learning in Unity.  

2. Geometry Wars Evolved

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Geometry Wars is a top down multi-directional shooter game made by a company called Bizarre Creations. It was originally a mini game that a person could play in the car game known as Project Gotham Racing 2 before becoming its own fully fledged franchise. I first played this game on my Xbox 360 and spent hours upon hours trying to beat my high score, also on the 360 you can earn achievement's by completing in game objectives and there is one in this game that still bugs me to this day that I was unable to complete. The game itself has a very simple concept with the user taking control of a small ship that is shaped like the letter c as you can see in the photo and survive for as long as possible while building up there score at the same time. The controls again are fairly simple to use with the left thumbstick the user can navigate around the rectangular map while using the right thumbstick to shoot the enemies. The game starts of at a small pace but it does not take long until you are bombarded with enemies on the screen and are left wondering how on earth am I going to beat all of these things. The user starts off with five lives and three map wiping bombs that will clear the map and give the user a chance to breath as getting touched by one of the enemies will result in you loosing a life. The game overall looks like one that I could possibly recreate using unity as it has a simple level design and mechanics.

3. Stuntman

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I would love to be able to make a car game, they provide a felling of their own when it comes to video games and always keep you on the edge of your seat. Stuntman is a car game that is not like any other car game, yeah sure you drive a car very fast in it but there are other elements to its also. The user plays as a stuntman and has to complete various objectives on each level in order to be awarded a gold, silver or bronze medal at the end. The reason I loved this game so much in the past is because it didn't just test you to see if you could finish in first place, you had to learn how to be fineness with the vehicle you were using. Depending on the movie you could be driving a regular car, a monster truck or a motorbike. The scenarios that the game put you in were fun to play for example one of the missions you are on the movie set of a spy film, its like a car scene from a James Bond movie. You get to control a car that can fire missiles and shoot machine guns which was incredibly fun. While I don't think I will be able to make this game giving my limited skillset it would be cool to make some sort of racing game. 

4. FIFA  

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FIFA is one of if not the number one most played sports game across all platforms these days. Being a massive football fan I would love to know how a game like this is made one day, just so that I would never loose at it and avoid the countless times this game would break my heart by conceding a 90th minute winner. But being serious , FIFA has come on leaps and bounds since I first started playing it back in the day. It has had huge success over the years with the game building on itself year on year. The great thing about this game I feel anyway as a fan is that you know what you are getting when you buy it, there is usually only one drastic change to the game every year and that is the gameplay mechanics. The concept of this game is not hard to grasp and I don't think there is a person alive who doesn't know what the objective is in football. While I get that I will not be able to make a game of this stature with my current skills , It would be nice to maybe create a simpler version of a football game using Unity.       

Helpful for getting started

I did some research into what would be helpful to get me started in using Unity and came across a helpful article that you may also like, you can find it here.