Blog Post 1 : Power up – Light
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Hello there. This week I’m going to talk about the design of the power up in the game “Depth”. This game concept was given as a choice to the students at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland, in the course Game Design 2, to create. Group Troll, which I am the project manager of, decided to create the game “Depth”. In the requirements, to get a passing grade, we had to include a power up, which this game concept was without. So it was up to us to create one. The aesthetics of this game was “last leg”. This means that the game should make the player feel like they are constantly running and that they are never safe. Since the game is supposed to be very dark and have limited vision, we decided early on that the power up should help with this problem. Though it can be seen as a bad power up by some, because it does not make you powerful or overpowered, it will greatly increase the chances of survival when the big majority of the game is as black as coal, as shown in the picture below.
By designing the power up in this way, the player does not feel safe and invincible, but it still helps the player see the environment and can help them plan for the enemies ahead. Therefore, we follow we aesthetic goals and in the same time help the player.
Another design question we had was how the enemies should affect the power up. The three types of enemies are: the pistol shrimp, the octopus and the jellyfish. The one of importance in this case is the octopus. Because this enemy take away the players light for a certain amount of time. Since it is a power up, one could argue that this enemy should no longer affect the player, but by doing that one could also say that the aesthetic goals are not met, since it will give the player a sense of safety when facing that enemy. Thus, it was decided that the octopus should still be a threat to the player, to not render the octopus useless during the power up and to follow the aesthetic goals of the game.  |
