Hey all.
For my course I had to attach my game design document to my blog. Well... HERE IT IS!
Game Design Document
Thanks!!!
Ryan
Monday 10 December 2012
Sunday 9 December 2012
Post 9... ON KONGREGATE!!
HEY ALL!
Games been published on kongregate, so if you'd all fancy going over and taking a play, would be greatly appreciated!!! http://www.kongregate.com/games/Hothead1993/dr-doctor-demo
It's only a demo so creative feedback and constructive criticism would be great :)
Games been published on kongregate, so if you'd all fancy going over and taking a play, would be greatly appreciated!!! http://www.kongregate.com/games/Hothead1993/dr-doctor-demo
It's only a demo so creative feedback and constructive criticism would be great :)
post number 8...
Well since it's due in on Monday, probably about time I make a decent blog post and detailed explanation about my game demo.
My Game is called Dr Doctor. In which the player assumes the role of an army medic shrunk down to the size of a virus and injected into the human body in order to fight off the virus threat.
The player uses the wasd keys along with . and / to control the Doctor. He can run left and right, jump, duck, shoot bullets and vacuum the enemies up. When an enemy is vacuumed up it is converted into a bullet, these bullets can be used to shoot the enemies and eventually the boss of that level.
The Normal Enemy Moves left and right and only damages the player on contact, depending on the level depends on whether they can fall of platforms or not. They do 25 damage to the player when they touch him.
The Demo has 3 levels, each with something a little different to the others, the idea is the levels get more oddly coloured throughout to represent how infected the area is as you get closer to the end. The first level has a red colour scheme, level 2 is browny yellow, and level 3 is green.
Each level has it's own boss but shares the same basic enemy. The bosses on each level do different things but currently are all killed just by being shot a set amount of times depending on which level you're on.
Boss 1:
Takes 25 bullets to kill it. Gives an unknown added incentive to the first level to save bullets. Fires 2 bullets at a time one going straight across which will definitely hit the player unless ducked under or jumped over, then the other one shoots down at the player and has 3 possible lines of travel.
Boss 2:
Takes 30 bullets to kill. The tank currently goes back and fourth across the screen and if the player is hit by the front of it the player takes 25 health and is pushed back, the player can jump ontop of the tank but wont be able to kill it that way.
Boss 3:
This is currently the final boss, which takes 50 bullets to kill. It has 4 guns that shoot down at the player at a rapid pace and the player has to dodge all of the bullets, the "factory" also produces an enemy that comes out of its doors every 2 seconds that will come at the player. Once this boss is defeated the player has completed the game.
Whilst using the macs in the lab I found I liked a font called Chalkduster, I found it kinda fitted with the childish look of my game, and also looked like an old blackboard type look to the game which fitted with the tenuous world war 2 theme. The only problem I have with this is that I can't make it consistent if I work on it at home unless I download the font off the internet, it's not an issue just a resource thought.
Problems I encountered along the way...
I encountered a problem that was causing the enemies to not rebound on side collision with a tile, instead it was causing all of the enemies to just freeze up and start shaking. In order to resolve this James in the lab implemented a new actor called barrier, and instead of creating collision detection between the tiles and the enemy there is a collision between the barrier and the enemy. This solved that problem.
Stencyl itself just sometimes does things for no apparent reason. For example I had just finished the 3rd level, and played a test level just to make sure it was working, and suddenly none of my animations for my character would work, and it wouldn't vacuum or shoot because of that. For some reason it changed the "self" when you change animations to a "self" that wasn't the "self" for that actor, so I had to change each "self" on each of the animations to what seemed to be the same "self" but apparently was a different "self" <-- is the "self" getting annoying yet?
When implementing the 2nd boss I set the physics to cannot be pushed, because I wanted the tank to be "heavier" than the player so if the player ran into the back of the tank it wouldn't increase the speed of the tank, however doing this meant that the 2nd boss just didn't move, so after faffing about in the blocks for a good half an hour I found out that the only problem was one radio button that said that the tank could move...
Stencyl also has a weird way of turning things off without your permission and just not functioning the way it should, which is restored normally by closing it and opening it again, which caused me to waste quite a bit of time because I didn't just think to restart stencyl at the beginning, so learn your lesson from me, RESTART STENCYL FIRST IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG. If that doesn't work then feel free to waste as much time as you want trying to fix whatevers wrong :')
I should be putting Dr Doctor onto Kongregate later, just have to sort some sound out for it, I'll post a link later that goes to my game on Kongregate :)
My Game is called Dr Doctor. In which the player assumes the role of an army medic shrunk down to the size of a virus and injected into the human body in order to fight off the virus threat.
The player uses the wasd keys along with . and / to control the Doctor. He can run left and right, jump, duck, shoot bullets and vacuum the enemies up. When an enemy is vacuumed up it is converted into a bullet, these bullets can be used to shoot the enemies and eventually the boss of that level.
Normal
Left
Vacuuming Right
Vacuuming Left
Shooting Right
shooting left
Vacuum enemy left
Vacuum Enemy Right
Walk Left
Walk Right
Jump Left
Jump Right
Duck Left
Duck Right
The Normal Enemy Moves left and right and only damages the player on contact, depending on the level depends on whether they can fall of platforms or not. They do 25 damage to the player when they touch him.
The Demo has 3 levels, each with something a little different to the others, the idea is the levels get more oddly coloured throughout to represent how infected the area is as you get closer to the end. The first level has a red colour scheme, level 2 is browny yellow, and level 3 is green.
Each level has it's own boss but shares the same basic enemy. The bosses on each level do different things but currently are all killed just by being shot a set amount of times depending on which level you're on.
Boss 1:
Takes 25 bullets to kill it. Gives an unknown added incentive to the first level to save bullets. Fires 2 bullets at a time one going straight across which will definitely hit the player unless ducked under or jumped over, then the other one shoots down at the player and has 3 possible lines of travel.
Boss 2:
Takes 30 bullets to kill. The tank currently goes back and fourth across the screen and if the player is hit by the front of it the player takes 25 health and is pushed back, the player can jump ontop of the tank but wont be able to kill it that way.
Boss 3:
This is currently the final boss, which takes 50 bullets to kill. It has 4 guns that shoot down at the player at a rapid pace and the player has to dodge all of the bullets, the "factory" also produces an enemy that comes out of its doors every 2 seconds that will come at the player. Once this boss is defeated the player has completed the game.
Whilst using the macs in the lab I found I liked a font called Chalkduster, I found it kinda fitted with the childish look of my game, and also looked like an old blackboard type look to the game which fitted with the tenuous world war 2 theme. The only problem I have with this is that I can't make it consistent if I work on it at home unless I download the font off the internet, it's not an issue just a resource thought.
Problems I encountered along the way...
I encountered a problem that was causing the enemies to not rebound on side collision with a tile, instead it was causing all of the enemies to just freeze up and start shaking. In order to resolve this James in the lab implemented a new actor called barrier, and instead of creating collision detection between the tiles and the enemy there is a collision between the barrier and the enemy. This solved that problem.
Stencyl itself just sometimes does things for no apparent reason. For example I had just finished the 3rd level, and played a test level just to make sure it was working, and suddenly none of my animations for my character would work, and it wouldn't vacuum or shoot because of that. For some reason it changed the "self" when you change animations to a "self" that wasn't the "self" for that actor, so I had to change each "self" on each of the animations to what seemed to be the same "self" but apparently was a different "self" <-- is the "self" getting annoying yet?
When implementing the 2nd boss I set the physics to cannot be pushed, because I wanted the tank to be "heavier" than the player so if the player ran into the back of the tank it wouldn't increase the speed of the tank, however doing this meant that the 2nd boss just didn't move, so after faffing about in the blocks for a good half an hour I found out that the only problem was one radio button that said that the tank could move...
Stencyl also has a weird way of turning things off without your permission and just not functioning the way it should, which is restored normally by closing it and opening it again, which caused me to waste quite a bit of time because I didn't just think to restart stencyl at the beginning, so learn your lesson from me, RESTART STENCYL FIRST IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG. If that doesn't work then feel free to waste as much time as you want trying to fix whatevers wrong :')
I should be putting Dr Doctor onto Kongregate later, just have to sort some sound out for it, I'll post a link later that goes to my game on Kongregate :)
Friday 7 December 2012
Been a long week
hey guys, been working a lot all week, here's a few shots of what I've done, will update more later tonight.
Sunday 2 December 2012
Post 5 - mid development
So my game is in full swing with 2 full levels almost complete and the majority of the mechanics working. Here's a brief run down of what goes on.
When the game comes up it opens with the opening screen. (funnily enough.)
From here pressing enter will take you to the story slides which give a brief overview of what's happening and give the game some context.
The game then enters a small tutorial level where the controls are taught. Simply gives the player a chance to learn the controls and once they've defeated both enemies on that level they're then dropped into level 1. Which starts of looking like this (Still using placeholder art):
The player starts off with 100 health and on contact with a virus they loose 25 points. However there are health packs the player can pick up that revitalise the player by 50 health points, and the player can have a maximum of 200 health. This has been implemented for the 2nd level. Where I have implemented a falling mechanic where by the user takes damage when they fall too far, and having a maximum of 200 health gives them a bit more of a chance to complete the level.
One feature of the first level is teaching the user than bullets can be scarce, and having the boss health so high means that the user is forced to use the vacuum mechanic more than the shoot mechanic, which increases the uniqueness of the game.
I have 2 types of enemy so far, the virus and the boss.
The virus doesn't attack but colliding with it damages the player, they have 2 way movement and rebound when they collide with walls. When the player collides with the virus the virus dies.
Dropped midflow here but I will finish it tomorrow :)
When the game comes up it opens with the opening screen. (funnily enough.)
From here pressing enter will take you to the story slides which give a brief overview of what's happening and give the game some context.
The game then enters a small tutorial level where the controls are taught. Simply gives the player a chance to learn the controls and once they've defeated both enemies on that level they're then dropped into level 1. Which starts of looking like this (Still using placeholder art):
Here the user fights their way through the viruses having to jump over gaps and up steps in the normal platformer fashion until the end when you meet the boss of the level.
This four eyed virus monster shoots lasers out of it's eyes in a straight line that the player must duck or jump over, or in a random angle in the direction of the player. Each laser does 20 damage points to the player when they're hit and the boss needs to be shot 20 times for it to die. When the boss dies the screen fades out and goes onto the next level. Which has been developed just isn't being shown at the moment.
The player starts off with 100 health and on contact with a virus they loose 25 points. However there are health packs the player can pick up that revitalise the player by 50 health points, and the player can have a maximum of 200 health. This has been implemented for the 2nd level. Where I have implemented a falling mechanic where by the user takes damage when they fall too far, and having a maximum of 200 health gives them a bit more of a chance to complete the level.
One feature of the first level is teaching the user than bullets can be scarce, and having the boss health so high means that the user is forced to use the vacuum mechanic more than the shoot mechanic, which increases the uniqueness of the game.
Due to the military background of the character I'm going to have the music have a very militaristic theme, whilst the player plays through the levels they will have a simple military beat in the background and then when they approach the boss the music will change into a different beat and instrument depending on the boss.
I have 2 types of enemy so far, the virus and the boss.
The virus doesn't attack but colliding with it damages the player, they have 2 way movement and rebound when they collide with walls. When the player collides with the virus the virus dies.
The boss changes with each levels, they will generally have a high health count (around 25) and depending on the boss there will be different methods of defeating him.
Dropped midflow here but I will finish it tomorrow :)
Tuesday 16 October 2012
Post 3, restart.
Right, old idea: scrapped until a later date. New idea, platform shooter.
Characters (so far):
The Doc.
Player character, has left right movement and is able to jump and duck, so 4 way direction (probably being controlled using the wasd keys or the arrow keys).
Weapon: Vacuum gun, sucks the enemies in and then converts them into antibodies which are shot out. Player must suck enemies in for them to become ammo. There may also be a melee attack too but I won't focus on that to start with.
Health: the player will have a maximum amount of health at the beginning of the game, but if injured will slowly regenerate over time, I don't want there to be any health pick ups in the game other than possibly at the end of each level where the Dr may be able to convert his ammo into health, or something like that. I don't want health packages to increase how vigilant the player is going to have to be and play carefully.
Enemies:
NDV (Nazi Death Virus, see story in a following post)
Main enemy character, can move left or right but cannot jump, can fall though if reaching the end of a platform onto another one. If walking into an object it will bounce off and walk the other way.
Weapon: can fire the virus infecter at the Dr in order to wound him, also colliding with the enemy the doctor will take damage.
Health: as the player progresses through the game the health of the virus will increase to ensure the difficulty increases. At the beginning of the game the user can vacuum all viruses up into ammo, later on the player may have to weaken viruses before sucking them up and converting them into ammo.
Bosses:
Tbc
Allies (maybe):
Immune system + antibodies.
Scene:
1944, Nazi's have developed a bio-weapon virus, the NDV, or NTV auf Deutsch (Nazi Totes-Virus), and are almost prepared to unleash it on both the east and western fronts, which would win them the war in a matter of weeks. Alerted by this, the Dr and his team are sneakily dropped into Berlin to try and stop the Nazis releasing the virus. Upon finding the lab, it turns out the virus was being produced in human beings and could be harvested from dead humans, one by one the doctor and his team destroyed the dead virus factories until just one was left. This body was under the top surveillance of the SS, the reason why, it was still alive. The body only reproduces the virus until it dies, so this factory was purposefully being kept alive to ensure they could keep reproducing the virus. It was far to risky for the Dr and his team so just destroy the factory and didn't want to be inhumane and kill the human straight out.
Instead the Dr, being the genius he was, showed his team a prototype shrink ray he had produced, and persisted that he was to be shrunk by it. After a scary and uncertain attempt at using the machine, the Dr was shrunk down to the size of the virus itself, he sneaked into the human factory via the blood stream with one intention, find out where the cells are being reproduced, and destroy the reproductive factory, at all costs.
Characters (so far):
The Doc.
Player character, has left right movement and is able to jump and duck, so 4 way direction (probably being controlled using the wasd keys or the arrow keys).
Weapon: Vacuum gun, sucks the enemies in and then converts them into antibodies which are shot out. Player must suck enemies in for them to become ammo. There may also be a melee attack too but I won't focus on that to start with.
Health: the player will have a maximum amount of health at the beginning of the game, but if injured will slowly regenerate over time, I don't want there to be any health pick ups in the game other than possibly at the end of each level where the Dr may be able to convert his ammo into health, or something like that. I don't want health packages to increase how vigilant the player is going to have to be and play carefully.
Enemies:
NDV (Nazi Death Virus, see story in a following post)
Main enemy character, can move left or right but cannot jump, can fall though if reaching the end of a platform onto another one. If walking into an object it will bounce off and walk the other way.
Weapon: can fire the virus infecter at the Dr in order to wound him, also colliding with the enemy the doctor will take damage.
Health: as the player progresses through the game the health of the virus will increase to ensure the difficulty increases. At the beginning of the game the user can vacuum all viruses up into ammo, later on the player may have to weaken viruses before sucking them up and converting them into ammo.
Bosses:
Tbc
Allies (maybe):
Immune system + antibodies.
Scene:
1944, Nazi's have developed a bio-weapon virus, the NDV, or NTV auf Deutsch (Nazi Totes-Virus), and are almost prepared to unleash it on both the east and western fronts, which would win them the war in a matter of weeks. Alerted by this, the Dr and his team are sneakily dropped into Berlin to try and stop the Nazis releasing the virus. Upon finding the lab, it turns out the virus was being produced in human beings and could be harvested from dead humans, one by one the doctor and his team destroyed the dead virus factories until just one was left. This body was under the top surveillance of the SS, the reason why, it was still alive. The body only reproduces the virus until it dies, so this factory was purposefully being kept alive to ensure they could keep reproducing the virus. It was far to risky for the Dr and his team so just destroy the factory and didn't want to be inhumane and kill the human straight out.
Instead the Dr, being the genius he was, showed his team a prototype shrink ray he had produced, and persisted that he was to be shrunk by it. After a scary and uncertain attempt at using the machine, the Dr was shrunk down to the size of the virus itself, he sneaked into the human factory via the blood stream with one intention, find out where the cells are being reproduced, and destroy the reproductive factory, at all costs.
Monday 8 October 2012
Post 2, getting started.
Throughout the last week I've conjured up several ideas for my first virus based game. The one I was most up for doing was a turn based strategy game with risk style elements to it. There would be two bases on opposite corners of the screen, and the objective of the game was to take the enemy team base, one team being the virus, the other being antibodies or the immune system. After making several sketches and some notes I was slowly being put off the idea, my thoughts being the potential of stencylworks and whether it was too ambitious for my first project.
The game involved multiple territories much like other war games, and the idea was to take the other teams base or wipe out all of the other teams units, to do this you'd conquer territories then when two enemy territories border, one would attack the other and based on numbers whoever had the most amount of units would win. This seemed pretty straight forward at first, then I thought about having backup, so:
if E was attacking A, then E would be backed up by all the neighbouring e's with units in them, and likewise A would be backed up defending by all of the a's.
e e a a
e E - A a
e e a a
I guessed not really knowing fully well how I would implement this in stencylworks I didn't know to what complexity I could make this game or maybe it should be something I should save until I have more experience.
This then leaves me with minor ideas and back to the beginning. As the game doesn't have to be something original I feel a bit more comfortable re-doing ideas people have done in the past, but with my own little twist. Working with a topic that could be quite small (a virus being invisible to the naked eye) on a canvas quite large (eg the human body), is quite difficult on the grand scale of things. Then I think about it a little differently, what about a computer virus, 2d scrolling shooter like Megaman, having a character in a virtual universe fighting cyber viruses. But again have my own take on it and do it my own way. Then there's ideas such as "race to the end" where the player controls a virus dodgy obstacles and trying to reach the end to "infect" the system/human.
Having looked into the way a living virus effects a human being it's quite difficult to visualize a game that could be based around that, a few viruses going into a cell which then populates and soon a load of cells are infected, which then again multiplies into a load of other cells being infected until the whole body is infected. This is unless the immune system gets involved, which then shows a defending force almost swallowing the viruses to kill them. But the immune system itself has multiple different ways of defeating viruses, for instance firstly the immune system must identify the virus, then send the right type of antibody to fight it.
I think I'll sit down tonight and have good think about what I'm going to do, then possibly start doing some conceptual drawings and some minor planning.
The game involved multiple territories much like other war games, and the idea was to take the other teams base or wipe out all of the other teams units, to do this you'd conquer territories then when two enemy territories border, one would attack the other and based on numbers whoever had the most amount of units would win. This seemed pretty straight forward at first, then I thought about having backup, so:
if E was attacking A, then E would be backed up by all the neighbouring e's with units in them, and likewise A would be backed up defending by all of the a's.
e e a a
e E - A a
e e a a
I guessed not really knowing fully well how I would implement this in stencylworks I didn't know to what complexity I could make this game or maybe it should be something I should save until I have more experience.
This then leaves me with minor ideas and back to the beginning. As the game doesn't have to be something original I feel a bit more comfortable re-doing ideas people have done in the past, but with my own little twist. Working with a topic that could be quite small (a virus being invisible to the naked eye) on a canvas quite large (eg the human body), is quite difficult on the grand scale of things. Then I think about it a little differently, what about a computer virus, 2d scrolling shooter like Megaman, having a character in a virtual universe fighting cyber viruses. But again have my own take on it and do it my own way. Then there's ideas such as "race to the end" where the player controls a virus dodgy obstacles and trying to reach the end to "infect" the system/human.
Having looked into the way a living virus effects a human being it's quite difficult to visualize a game that could be based around that, a few viruses going into a cell which then populates and soon a load of cells are infected, which then again multiplies into a load of other cells being infected until the whole body is infected. This is unless the immune system gets involved, which then shows a defending force almost swallowing the viruses to kill them. But the immune system itself has multiple different ways of defeating viruses, for instance firstly the immune system must identify the virus, then send the right type of antibody to fight it.
I think I'll sit down tonight and have good think about what I'm going to do, then possibly start doing some conceptual drawings and some minor planning.
Sunday 30 September 2012
Computing and Game Development Log Entry 1
Hey guys welcome to my game development blog.
Here I will talk about my course at the University of Plymouth. I am undertaking the BSc (Hons) Computing and Games Development course. A 3 year course with an optional gap year. In this blog I will be logging my time here and the development stages of any of my work, be it just concept ideas from game mechanics to video demos.
I have had a couple of ideas about the game I'm going to make. Ideas have been from a range of genres, from real time strategy, attack and defend, to slightly rpg type games. I've made a few sketches and a few initial ideas which need to be refined.
Until next time :)
Ry