Game dev week#3; Magical prototypes and design documents (Team 13)
Hi!I am doing a new course; introduction to game development. The idea is to band together with the five other people one worked with during the Introduction to game design course, pick a game concept created by another group during that course, and then create the game over ten weeks. I have been chosen as game designer for my group, so I have been doing a lot of design documentation ever since the start of the project, three weeks ago. We have two programmers in our group and four graphic artists, so I have tried to keep the game as simple as possible while still being fun and engaging. Designing a game without an up to date prototype that keeps up with your design decisions turns out to be a lot of theorizing, guesswork, and calculation. I did create a paper prototype to test theories which gave us a general idea of what direction we are heading in, but writing a design document with a paper prototype as basis is very shaky when one is making a full digital game. Yesterday, I finally snapped and decided to quickly create a prototype implementing most of the features currently planned. That way, I could actually test our mechanics and make sure they work toward our aesthetic goals, and tweak them if they do not. I created the prototype using LittleBigPlanet Vita, a video game where you can make video games and then share those games with other people. Check out a trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfwm3jeHlzw Anyway! I created the prototype over six hours. It’s all placeholder art and circles but it gets the job done. Here are some screen grabs. Sorry for the poor image quality! 
Here, the player is underground, but a mean skull person has found your dirt trail and is flooding your tunnel! You better go to the surface before you drown. 
The mole (handsome orange dot) is above ground which halves their speed and makes them vulnerable to direct contact with gardeners. In return, the mole can eat vegetables and is safe from tunnels being flooded. Here’s a quick overview of the prototype and the general plan for Mole Munch; You are a mole. Your goal is to get ten vegetables without dying. You move with the left stick, but can also press X to swithc between surface and dig mode. When in surface mode you can eat vegetables, but you are also vulnerable to direct contact with gardeners. Dig mode doubles movement speed, but a trail of dirt is also left behind. If an enemy happens upon a trail of dirt, they will flood the tunnel with water, drowning you if you are still in the tunnel. Enemies move in a line until they collide with a wall or another enemy, and then switch to the mirrored direction and continue that way. If they find a trail of dirt, they stop and flood it and then continue in the same direction. My plan was to have the player strategically switching between surface and dig mode, avoiding enemies and flooded tunnels left and right. It’s designed to be simple to code since we are low on coders, but also fun to play. I have had some testers, and reactions have been positive. Several communication issues with the visuals and gameplay have been spotted, but overall players are having the experience I intended them to, which is nice. With this prototype, I can iterate and test new features, seeing what works and what does not until the programmers have a prototype impementing the features already documented. Designing with actual testing is, unsurprisingly, very effective! I have already tweaked several numbers I had to guess myself to in the design document. This way, I can give the programmers actually tested numbers and well defined features. That’s all! Thanks for reading.  |
