Alien ship – death behaviour
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One of the most core elements of our game is to shoot Aliens. To avoid a simple and dull mechanic we wanted to introduce something that would require the player to think before shooting. To create this more immersive gameplay our idea was to create a form of domino effect when shooting down the aliens. When an alien is shot down, it will have a death movement pattern, or death behaviour, before it eventually explodes. This movement pattern will for example move upwards, where it could collide with another alien behind it. Here is an example. Alien A is shot down, and it travels upwards for a short time period before eventually exploding in the red area. There alien A collides with alien B, which triggers the same death behaviour, and therefore creating a domino effect. This is a very basic example of how this element could be implemented in the game, and it could create a sophisticated gameplay. I compared facing a wave of aliens to “solving a puzzle”, where the player could find the most optimal way of defeating a wave by foreseeing which alien could trigger the biggest domino effect. However, as stated before, this is a basic basic example of how the mechanic works. Our aliens have unique movement patterns when moving towards the planet, making just hitting them a challange of sorts. Merging the movement pattern with the death behaviour will be a challange for us as developers. We don’t want it to be a complete madness of shooting everything moving. There should be thought before action, like my comparison to solving the puzzle. Here is another example:
Here we have alien A and B that have a movement pattern of moving in a zig-zag motion or tornado, however you want to call it. First off, the player should decide which alien to aim for first, since you might be pressing for time to protect another sector. Let’s assume that the player is aware of both the movement pattern and death behaviour that it moves straight down when shot down. The player can first of foresee where the death behaviour will collide with the other alien’s movement pattern. If the player can calculate this, the player will need to also calculate the timing and have the skill to aim right. If the player shoots down alien A when it’s not at a position where the death behaviour will collide with alien B, the player will need to shoot down alien B aswell afterwards. Now I’m not saying that this mechanic is the only way to defeat the wave. Like in many games, you can choose your play style to defeat the level. If the player feels more comfortable in aiming everything right with a minimal domino effect, that’s doable aswell. We are all different kind of players with our own way of playing games. With this in mind, I still want the player to explore the multiple ways of defeating a wave. The “puzzle” can have multiple ways to be solved. I think our mechanic is open for a lot of possibilities and maybe different players have solutions that we as developers did not think of. I could use the game Portal as an example, where a room never has the only one way to defeat the level. I’m excited in how we will continue developing this in the future!  |
