Refining Rules and Concept

Strangely enough, my concept became refined halfway into the design process. It's well stated on this blog that I haven't been entirely sure of what my 'edge' is but I think I've finally found it with a change of thought with a particular actor. 


Escape Point


I was designing the end point at which the character exits the level and I came to the conclusion that a door was too cliché and rather out of place. After designing a few of the mobs and interacting actors, I noticed my game was taking more or a paper-sketched feel than anything else. I made the decision that the player would reach the endpoint and jump into a hole. 

With this in mind, I decided to start treating the game as a sketch game. The playable character had already taken place as a stickman, which follows the trend, and so I decided to take it further and really make the game its own. I designed my own sketch-like tileset on a 96x128 pixel sheet. The sheet comprises of main 32x32 pixel tiles that are cut up into their own once imported into Stencylworks.


Tileset

To apply the finishing touches to this concept and roll with it, I snapped a photo of crumpled paper to use as a parallax scrolling background:

Unfortunately, this background became too small to use as a parallax scrolling background, and not suitable enough to use as a repeated background. I knew that I wanted to stay in keeping with this idea so I sourced out a open source tileset site and choose from there so that I may achieve a fluent repeating background.

Obstacle Design

In order to come up with ideas for levels for the game, I have had to come up with just a few lifeless mobs and obstacles that will pose a threat to the player. With this concept in mind, it's the levels that are designed around the defined obstacle 'courses'. Below are a few designs for a couple or periodically spawning mobs:

Shooter

This actor will spawn and shoot projectiles across the screen until they collide with something. If it hits a player, the player will die and reload. If it hits a wall, it will shatter or explode. Initially I decided on daggers, though I went back on the idea and followed with a cannon shooting cannon balls.

Spikeballs

These are a few design ideas for the spawning, rolling balls that are designed to wipe out the player on contact. They will be spawned from a flashing spawn point and have them move across the screen on a set path. 

The player will be expected to avoid the rolling balls by either jumping or moving amongst them in time with their motion.

Final Designs

Cannon:

Spikeball & Spawner:

Character Abilities

At this point I know what I want my game to consist of, though I am not entirely settled on the overall concept. My game does not yet have a particular selling point that defines it. Currently, it is still a platform jumper that involves obstacle manoeuvring and various aspects of level control. I have a feeling it will be based around telekinesis, although I may later find myself limited by my ability to achieve such complicated tasks in development.


Manipulating Direction of Play


This section involves some paper prototyping I have undertaken. I have put down onto paper ideas I have for how the player will use objects in the game to change the direction of play and work their way through obstacles and puzzles in order to reach the end point.

Platform Control

Here, the player has the ability to move platforms 'with their mind'. Having this technique may allow the player to travel to another point deemed previously unreachable, or block a lethal object that poses a threat.

Pushable Blocks

In the above picture, I have depicted a projectile being fired from the right. In this scenario, it is assumed that this projectile will be continuously shot by a spawner and so you must push a moveable block in the path of these projectiles in order to continue in the direction specified.

Stompable Blocks

This is a concept I have stumbled across because it is included in some of the packs I have snuck a peak at on Stencylworks. In the pack, it features only as an animation, though I suspect I will use it to allow the player to smash through objects in order to progress or change the path of play. This very much plays into the sort of mechanics I am working towards for my game.

Jumping Obstacles

To add further to my idea of tackling obstacles, it may be a nice change of pace to include a 'spring pad' type actor that allows the player to gain more height than usual. I do feel, however, that if I do include this then I need probably not include the double jump feature.

Related Concepts

I've felt that the best way to come up with ideas for gameplay and artwork is to pull ideas from existing games that work well. Starting with gameplay, I already know that I'd like to make a 2D platformer, though I know very little about I am going to develop from that idea. May game needs to have a more fundamental concept, or game mechanic.


Referring to tried and testing games that I have enjoyed in recent years, the following was brought to mind..




Super Meat Boy:

I played this game after it was bought for me by a friend and came to find it very addictive. The game challenges you to navigate through obstacles in order to reach an end point and progress to the next level. A key aspect of the game is trial and error. You are pretty much expected to fail at every first attempt of navigating through a new level. This does not stunt your attitude, however, as you respawn very quickly after death without even reloading the level. It almost feels like rapid prototyping obstacle approaches! I like this approach as you are not penalised for having multiple attempts at passing a level. The emphasis is not on how skilled you are at making it through the game, but more about how you adapt and learn to smooth out your control of 'meat boy'.


A second point I favour in this game is that you are the only living, moving character throughout. The 'mobs' that pose a risk to you are static or patrolling non-living entities. I feel I may go either way with this one and have just one and not the other.




Infectonator! World Dominator:

This is one of the 10 games I reviewed, as previously mentioned. It was brought to the front of my mind when I started to consider how my game may look. Something I am keen on doing from the start of my game is to design original textures, tiles and sprites. Keeping that in mind, I would like to go with a simplistic theme that's both easy to draw and easy to hide mistakes with. This game has a 90's feel aesthetic look as the designer has chosen to go with a pixel drawing; where each pixel is drawn with a solid block of colour.




Psi-Ops

Although this game is not a 2D game by any means, I would like to employ it's core concept as a possible game mechanic for my game. The basis of this game is the ability to be able to control people and objects with your mind. I would like to have my game use some sort mind-control element with which to manipulate objects on the screen in order to pass the level.

Brainstorming Ideas

It's early days and about time to start developing ideas for a game concept. I've played and reviewed 10 games hosted on Kongregate in order to get an understanding of what works and what is popular to date. It's been quite a while since I have played flash games and I have come to notice that they have come a long way. Whilst playing reviewing these games, I have been taking the time to note what game mechanics work and how games look these days. 

After playing and reviewing recent games, I was ready to start brainstorming my own ideas. With a lot of ideas buzzing around in my head and no real direction as to where I might start; I employed the use of a few basic mind map and word association programs to get me started.

Word Association

Here is a capture of a word association map produced by Wordle:

This really is a very basic form of brainstorming, but is a nice way to kick off with some research. I copied in a few collections of text from various sites that tell you, in their own words, what a game actually is. From that, the site using a script to pull out the most relevant key words and then displays them back graphically with the bigger words holding more emphasis. Some of the words that crop up are unnecessarily obvious, yet there are already concepts emerging from terminology in there that I would not have immediately associated with 'Games'.

Mind Mapping

The next logical step was to map out some ideas about the sorts of games I could make, before even considering any limitations I might have with my knowledge of design and experience with relevant software. I decided to employ the use of a program I have used in the past to visualise ideas into a smartly laid out and annotated map.

Here is a Concept mind map made with MindGenius that merely depicts the game types I could go forward with when making a 2D flash game:

In the picture, coloured child labels are game mechanics that came up more than once for assorted game types.

What I achieved from producing this is seeing how open I am to producing an original idea should I choose to run with any of these game types. I noticed that choosing to make a 2D Platform game  would leave me open to a whole array of interesting game mechanics, as it appeared to be the least limited in what you can produce. As I am new to game making, and the design process for it, I felt it most appropriate to make my game a 2D Platform jumper - and then produce something original from that.