A Fruitful meeting

During our second meeting, we did more decision-making on the game. This blog post will not discuss those decisions, but will discuss the game design aspects.

In the top-down shooter game, endless hordes of enemies will attack the player and his team until they die. There will be no winning state in the. We named our game “Endless” since there is an infinite number of enemies that attack the squad.

In terms of graphics, members took two different sides during our meeting. One side wanted a fast paced Halo-arcade-like game while the other side wanted a cartoony shooter game. In the end, we settled on an anime style, as it represents sort of a middle ground for the sides, having both realistic and cartoon elements.

As for the game itself, there are 4 characters: the medic, assault, sniper, and engineer. Their characteristics are discussed below:

Medic: The medic has the ability to heal other players. The disadvantage is that the medic will have low health and less powerful weapons (Pistols).

Assault: The assault unit is the well-rounded unit. He is able to take a lot of damage as well as cause a sustainable amount of damage to the enemy units with assault rifles and machine guns. The assault unit will be the tank in the game.

Sniper: The sniper will have the ability to wield powerful rifles with amazing aim which can fire penetrating bullets which will pass through multiple enemies until it hits a wall or leaves the battlefield boundaries. Though, even with such a powerful weapon, it has a disadvantage. Sniper rifles will have the longest shooting delay between bullet fires.

Engineer: The engineer has the ability to setup turrets or defence mechanisms to help his teammates. If the engineer levels up, the turrets will level up as well. However, if the engineer dies, then the turrets will lose its functionality. The engineer will be able to wield weapons of average power (Maybe Submachine guns).

Since this is the plan for each character it could change in the future if it is approperate.

“Endless” like most other games, will have an in game currency. The name has not yet been decided on but for the purpose of this blog post we will call them gold. As a group we decided on how the player should receive gold in the game. We thought that we should give out gold for every enemy kill that the player does. The group also decided whether the gold should be a fixed amount for each different enemy or randomized between a minimum and a maximum value for each monster. The group chose the randomize method. We also considered whether the player should only receive gold from what he/she killed. But we thought that it would not be fair since each character doesn’t have the same strength and in single player the AI could kill-steal the monsters and the money would go nowhere. So we decided that gold in the game will be shared as a team. When the wave of enemies is defeated, the player has the chance to manage the expenditure of weapons for the entire team. In co-op, the money will be divided into the number of players. We decided to split the gold evenly as it would splitting it other ways would be unfair to the medic, who theoretically, should have the least kills. Gold is also rewarded when the player finishes each level. We are still contemplating whether the amount of gold should be time based or not (probably will with a base amount of gold rewarded on top of that).

The game would be angled (not completely 90 degrees from the ground) a bit less than 90 degrees so there would be a bit of a perspective feel to it.

Lastly, we talked about weapons. We thought of two structures for our game’s weapon progression. First structure involves making each weapon for its class similar but with little benefits as the price significantly advances for the more realistic feal. For example,

Weapon A is similar to Weapon B for the same price but Weapon A has a bit lower accuracy and a bit higher shoot speed than Weapon B. Weapon E (skipping a few) is higher priced than Weapon A and B but is better than both of them and is similar to Weapons D and F.

The second structure is where each weapon upgrades until it reaches its full potential, there’s no need for the player to compare weapons for curtain prices like the first structure, it always gets better the more expensive it is (like in many Japanese RPG games where the price = power of the weapons). The group realized that there is more of a game dynamics on the first weapon progression theory. If we used the weapon upgrade theory, the player will just keep killing enemies to earn money in order to upgrade to the ultimate weapon. But the first theory suggests the player to think of tactics and weapons that will suit the player’s way of playing the game. In the end we leant towards the first structure for realism and flexibility which would involve more strategy for the players.