Selected Idea + Details

So the idea that I've selected to continue working on is the beat em up fighting game with Interactive Media Design students as characters in the game. I'm interested in seeing the results of having more than one person controlling characters that they can identify with, adding something deeper in the character development aspect as these will be people that are already existent. I will take a couple of people as starting points and try to develop them as much as I possibly can, from special moves to how they act in certain situations, and I think I can do something really positive with this.


The game will take place in a series of levels, and the interesting part for me is to be able to create some really nice environments, most probably with 3D software such as Blender or Cinema4D. It will give me experience in trying to model as well as create the 2D interactivity in Flash. I hope that the final result will be a flash game, so there will be a steep technical learning curve when it comes to actionscript, moreso than animating and tweening.


The end control will be the user playing as one of these in-game characters based on real people, and the aim is for one player to beat up the other (until the opposing player reaches zero health) to win the game. I will try to have two players playing simultaneously to breed some form of competition, which is what I hope will make the game itself successful, so two characters will be controlled by two players who really want to win. If I can develop at least one level or environment that the player gets to play, I'll be very happy with the progress I have made, as tackling one level is going to be a tougher process for me.


I'm creating this game because it presents me with a lot of opportunities to cover as much of the games design process as possible, developing characters, building environments, but also technical aspects such as animation, collision, statistics and more. What's going to be different about this game is the way that it plays, many games now separate players by controllers, so if I have two players controlling with one keyboard, it may bring them closer. The mechanics of the game itself will also differentiate it from some of the other games that are out in the market now, as well as other smaller flash games that have already been released online. 


The general features for the game will be as follows:


- Full Player Control: The ability to manipulate your player as you would like the player to be controlled. What is expected of the player that is being controlled, and how will that player fulfil his role in my game world, of beating the other player up.

- Health Tracking + Statistics: Monitoring health in games such as these is going to be imperative to realising the full concept, so I am going to do more research into how I can achieve this in Flash, if there are any other fighting game engines that exist which handle this appropriately, and if I can find any other games that do things differently.


- Collision + Hit testing: This is another primary function for me, preventing players from walking off-stage, through objects, and allowing the two combatants to hit each other and in turn affect the way health is reduced and calculated.


- Combat: The combat itself is something that I need to consider, whether I want players to continuously hit each other by running towards each other and making physical contact, or whether I should streamline the combat and give players projectiles to use instead. Depending on the option I pick, it will change the way the game plays, so more user testing will need to be done in order to see if either of the selected methods work well when taken forward.



Thinking about it now, I am considering adding a story to the game, possibly only following one perspective of a selected character. The idea is that when you pick a player, you also pick their story and their perspective, but for now I will try to work on one characters background and start taking in some research to see how others have dealt with stories in such genres of gaming.