Nazeeh’s Little Corner on the Web

As promised in my previous post, today I’ll try to take a stab at designing my own game. I told you  how important the game design process is and how you should know all that there is to know about your game before writing any code. Well, turns out that it’s not a very easy thing to do! I spent a few days brainstorming in my head and trying to come up with what I wanted to do. Finally, I got a good grasp on the major game mechanics I wanted to do and started to dig deeper and find more ideas. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

Project Name

If recall from the last post, I said that it’s pretty important to come up with a project name for your game. For me, I picked the name “Odyssey”! Why do you ask? I don’t know… it’s all I could come up with. I didn’t say it had to be a good name! Just that you should have one! Mine’s lame, but I am gonna stick with it!

Game Description

Odyssey is planned to be a 2D side scrolling shooter that is pretty simple. In one player mode, you play as a flying ship (how original! I know) with enemies attacking you from the right side of the screen.

In two player mode the game really shines! The second player controls a tank on the ground and both players work together to fight the enemies. Each player has a dominant color (indicated by the color of their ship/tank). Enemies that carry your color only you can kill, while other enemies you can’t harm. This leads to a game play where the two players have to work together to eliminate the correct colored enemies otherwise they will both die by an overwhelming force. Enemies not of your color will attempt to attack you more frequently and thus cause a great threat to you that can only be eliminated by your buddy.

In two player mode, the ship can move up/down/left and right while the tank can only move left and right. The ship has less health than the tank as well as less firepower. But the agility/speed it can move with offsets that weakness.

The game will progress via levels. Each level will have a preset number and type of enemies that will attack you ending with some sort of boss battle. Boss battles will utilize the same color based combat, details will differ per boss. You win the game if you finish all the levels. You lose when you consume all the available lives you have. In two player mode, you and your buddy share the same pool of lives, so you both lose when you both consume them all.

The enemies will come in different flavors:

• Neutral color enemies: These guys can be damaged by either player. They are the only type that is available in the single player mode.
• Color matching enemies: These enemies match either of the two players’ color. They can only be killed by the correct player. They will attack the non-matching player more frequently and hence cause a threat to them. These are only available in two player mode.
• Boss: Bosses occur once per level at the end. They are unique per level and need a strategy to beat them.

You have a pool of lives in the game, once you go through them all, you are dead and the game is over. Two player mode both players share the same pool. Players gain an extra life everytime they score 5000 points (might change that based on how the game plays, might increase or decrease it).

The game will have power-ups in multiple flavors. Power-ups are spawned based on certain triggers from dead enemies:

• Health: These will start first floating in the air for 2 seconds to give the ship a chance to get them then will drop on the ground for the tank and stay for 2 seconds before they disappear. These will spawn after you kill X number of enemies. X is to be determined.
• Weapon Fire Rate increase: This power up will increase the firing rate of your weapon. It will spawn and start to float downwards towards the floor. Will live on the floor for 3 secs then disappear. Either player can pick it up. Will spawn after you kill X enemies and will last for 20 seconds indicated by a timer on the HUD.
• Nuke power-up: This power-up will drop randomly and allow you to detonate a nuke that clears all enemies on the screen.

Odyssey might have an achievement system. This is yet to be determined. If it does, it will be based on number of kills, length of time you survived, etc.

Network play is a possibility based on time and cost needed to implement it. Same console/PC play remains as priority 1 for now.

Game will support Xbox and PC and use keyboard/controller.

Game Story

The game will not really have much of a story. Your basic alien bad guys attacking our planet and we have two new war machines in the form of a ship and tank that work together to fend off the attacks. I might re-think the story later as I get more of the game mechanics nailed down.

Inspirations

The game is inspired by a lot of games out there. The first one that comes to mind is Heavy Weapon on Xbox Live Arcade. I like the way the tanks in that game move around and the way the enemies attack. Here’s a screenshot of Heavy Weapon for reference:

Things I like:

• I like how the tanks move horizontally from that game. I will use that same motion in Odyssey.
• I like the coloring of the tanks to differentiate them. This is basically a Color.Blue argument to spriteBatch that tints the color of the sprite. I will use that same method in Odyssey two player mode.
• I might borrow some of the weapon ideas from here too.

Another game I looked at is Jet’n'Guns seen here:

I particularly like the HUD in this game. Check out how the health is indicated by the small gauge at the bottom left corner. Simple HUD, and very non-obtrusive. The graphics are cool as well, not that I expect to get anywhere close to that kind of work ;)

Experimental Ideas

I have this one idea that I am experimenting with in my mind because I am not sure how well it will work. The game will inevitably reach a point where one of the players has more health than the other one and wants to help them out. I am thinking of integrating an ability that sits on a long cooldown timer that allows you to transfer some of your health to your buddy to help them out. You lose that health of course, but you give them the boost they need to stay in the game and not consume a life. Still thinking about that one though.

So what’s next?

So now that I have a basic idea of what I want Odyssey to look and play like, I will start to think about what technologies and techniques I want to use for the game. Next post, we’ll talk about a very popular and heavily used sample that I plan to use for this game. I am talking about the GameState Management sample that you can grab from http://creators.xna.com. It’ll be a good idea to take a look at it now and be familiar with it in preparation for next post!

Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts, feel free to leave a comment below. Don't forget to subscribe to my RSS Feed!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Beginner Game Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.