So the first idea I had for my game is a holiday-based tourist "survival" platformer, in which you play a character on his vacation in Paris. You start off in a very adequate hotel where breakfast is free, however paying for food is just too much for you and your family. So the objective is to steal as much free breakfast as you can in order to feed your family for the rest of the day. As this would be based in Paris, your entire meals would consist of baguettes, croissants, butter, cheese, milk, juice and other varieties of breakfast foods.
The game itself would operate as a platformer in which you walk, sneak, or prone around the hotel breakfast area making trips from the breakfast tables back to your table with this free food. Hotel staff such as waiters and possibly managers will be on duty who don't take kindly to such behaviour, and if your character happens to get caught, you will lose your lives which in turn cause you to lose the game.
The good thing about this game is that it is constantly engaging your mind, having to be spatially aware within a new environment and splitting your attention across many areas. As well as it being a platformer, it is a mentally stimulating game and I think this is going to help make the actual game successful. One drawback I have considered however is actually developing this artificial intelligence that will move onstage and have this moving field of vision that catches you out. This may be too ambitious for me to code as an inexperienced flash user, and this slightly worries me in comparison to the value of the learning experience I get out of it.
So my second idea was to develop a beat-'em-up composed of people from the Interactive Media Design course, in which each character would have special abilities developed from existing in-jokes, personality traits and other qualities. To further the interaction in the game, I wanted to couple this with the possibility of making it a platformer game, in which characters would be able to use platforms as interesting obstacles to give the combat a new dimension. If this was possible, I would also like to include the ability to obtain randomly appearing power-up collectables which enhances your characters qualities such as strength or speed. Another introduction I would like to see as well as having an interface that tracks health (and possibly time) is the addition of a "special bar" in the form of an anger system. As you lose health, your bar increases, and when your bar is full you can utilise a very special character ability which will deal significantly larger damage to your opponent.
The idea is that the characters which are developed into functional and animated sprites share a likeness to the characters which they are based on, however they will be simplified in detail. I think that itself will add more personality to the game, as emotions are much easier to capture in simplified illustrations. More emphasis will be on the gameplay itself and the graphics, again more than having something based on the story as my target is to have a game that is entertaining to play and replay.
There are some ambitious qualities to this game such as the special system and the platformer aspect of the experience, however I think I can break this down by starting with the basic movements which will allow me to transition much easier to the more complex areas of the game. What I have also been interested in is actually getting some hands-on with Blender software in order to model and develop environments for my game to take place, so importing those environments into flash (where the game will actually be developed) would be great for my whole learning experience.
Ok, so the third idea of my game was to develop this highly physics based game in which you're controlling a cannon mechanism at the bottom of the level, which aims to fire a ball into a hole or target at the top of the level. On the way there are some platforms which are controllable via Keyboard controls. These platforms will rotate at 360 degrees and help you use gravity and momentum to hit the ball towards the intended target. As the game progresses, there will be more interesting and creative ways in which you have to hit the target, more obstacles and platforms will be present making the game more difficult as you progress.
The thing I like about this idea is that there is more than one point of control, many objects are going to be interacting with each other in different ways, depending on the positioning of platforms and how many the player will be able to control at once. And this brings me to one of those problems, how many platforms is a player going to be able to control at a time? If I make more than one platform move at once with one control, will I then end up developing levels that are too difficult?
The concept itself is something I like, and there'll be a hell of a lot of usability testing to do once the levels are completed, but unlike the previous two ideas this one can be implemented into a 3D environment. If the game was then opened up to the possibility of it being in a 3D environment as opposed to being just 3D in a 2D plane, what more options can I add and how can I control all of these variables in such a setting? This is something I'll definitely have to think about.
The thing I like about this idea is that there is more than one point of control, many objects are going to be interacting with each other in different ways, depending on the positioning of platforms and how many the player will be able to control at once. And this brings me to one of those problems, how many platforms is a player going to be able to control at a time? If I make more than one platform move at once with one control, will I then end up developing levels that are too difficult?
The concept itself is something I like, and there'll be a hell of a lot of usability testing to do once the levels are completed, but unlike the previous two ideas this one can be implemented into a 3D environment. If the game was then opened up to the possibility of it being in a 3D environment as opposed to being just 3D in a 2D plane, what more options can I add and how can I control all of these variables in such a setting? This is something I'll definitely have to think about.
