Powering up the Power up – Blog post 2: 20180215
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So – this week is Alpha week – and my post will describe my reasoning concerning the detailed design of the power up. The game that we are creating in my team is named “Aetherial” in the original concept document and the main objective for you as a player is to hunt and kill the big whale. Like a Moby Dick story in the sky you could say. Early in this course, on the very first design meeting I called for, we designed a draft for the how the power up was supposed to work and why, together in the team. When Alpha started to really get closer, I realised that I had to make some final design decisions about the Power up, so the team could build and implement it before Alpha. Because of this, I decided to talk this through with the team on the sprint planning for this week. As this was not only the power up itself, but also how the player would receive it, I broke down the whole scene where this happens. This is how it turned out: 1. The whale (the boss in the game) appears in the bottom of the screen, and you can only see its back. The whale has armor plates on its back, that can be drawn away from the whale. 2. On one armor plate there will be a crystal, that the player has learned in the beginning of the game that she should destroy. It can only be destroyed by using the harpoon (that is one of two weapons in our game, the other one is a beem). 3. When the player shoots the crystal with the harpoon, it breaks, and an animation of a fragmented crystal appears on the screen, above the whale. That is the power up. 4. The player can now fly into the power up and pick it up. Then an animated power up indicator (a picture of the ship) will be revealed on the screen, telling the player that she now has a power up to use. 5. The player now can see that the harpoon is stuck in the armor plate, and that a chain combines the harpoon with the ship. When the player flies away from the whale, the armor plate comes of the whale and reveals a weak spot under. The player can now hurt the whale with the harpoon and the whale leaves the scene. In the real level in the game, the player will save the power up for later, but for Alpha, we let the player test it right away, so: 6. There will be a large wave of enemies spawning on the screen, too many to handle for the player. The power up is blinking in the UI and as the player presses a key the weather changes by larges clouds cover the whole sky. The player can still see the enemies as silhouettes, but the enemies cannot see the player, so they lose track of the player and can´t hurt her for 30 seconds (the seconds will be balanced later), while you can kill them all.
Note that the pictures are not screen shots, I have just put together not finished concept art to make the design easier to understand. Harpoon and the small enemy is made by Isak Mansén; the ship, the whale and the crystal by Emelie Almroth, and the UI by Juste Eriksson. This detailed explanation was what I brought to the team for discussion, and after a few adjustments we turned it into tasks for the week. The reason why the power up scene has quite a lot going on, is because we wanted it to add something to the game. I believe this mechanic will help us achieve the aesthetics (as described in the MDA framework) that we want the player to experience when she plays our game (feeling like a champion). As we have spoken a lot about in my minor, Design, when we have talked about user stories: we must always think of the value for the player.
Link to my comment for this week: https://kassandergd.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/boss-design/  |
