Core Experience, Left4Dead

This lecture we talked about the importance of Core Experience in a game and at the end of the day we got together in our groups and had to find a game that we all had played. Our task was to think of the Core Experience in that game and either create a completely new game but with the same Core Experience or to recreate the game with the same Core Experience. Luckily the professors only asked for a paperprototype of that game but we had once again only one nights time. My team choose to make a playable paperprototype of Left 4 Dead that we later named 

                                                  “Zombie Run 3000”.

We came up with that the core experience of the classic game Left 4 Dead is to survive with the help from the group. How were we now supposed to create a playable paperprototype of this game? We decided to make the game a boardgame with cards and dices. The game Left 4 Dead is pretty open so we made a big playmap were the players could move around freely with help from squares. The goal was like in the real Left 4 Dead to get from the beginning to the end that we called the “safehouse“. To be able to get to the safehouse you need to pick up a key which is placed in the middle of the map. Now we had the goal of the game but what is a zombie game without weapons and enemys? We decided to create “Event Cards“, cards that were drawn every second turn and could spawn zombies. To know what amount, what direction and what distance we added the information on the random cards. Now we had our Zombies. 
The next step was to include special weapons with different attributes like the shot gun or the sniper, to the game, and medpacks, to be able to heal yourself or mend other players. These cards we called the “Reward Cards” and for these we put out locations on the map that you had to reach in order to receive one. To make the game more surprising like in the original game we also added some Event Cards (Zombie spawners) to the reward cards.

The different kind of weapons that is available in the game is:

• Pistol
  • 2 dmg, 2 range
• Rifle
  • 4 dmg, 3 range
• Shotgun
  • 3 dmg, 1 range
• Sniper
• 5 dmg, 5 range

* 1 range = 1 square

We talked about having ammunition in the game just like in the real version but we agreed that it would be to much to keep track of. There is also a few different kind of zombies:

• Regular zombies
  • 2 HP, 2 dmg
• Tank
  • 15 HP, 6 dmg
• Smoker
  • 5 HP, 2 dmg
  • Draws the player towards him from 5 steps away.
• Hunter
  • 5 HP, 2 dmg
  • Fast, meaning it will get to roll the dice twice.

Down below is a pdf of our first concept board. The scan gives the idea of how the players will be able to move.