The Design Process of selfish
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As a pure design student, my main tasks in this project are to: document design decisions, take a leading part in testing the game and communicate the design to ensure that everyone is on the same page. My intended tasks have differed greatly from what I’ve actually done. I consider this both good and bad. By having me as the designer adapting to different situations we have managed to make great progress with our game. However, this comes with a cost of not becoming as specified like for instance a programmer. One task that I’ve taken on is becoming the product owner, even though this generally is the producers job, this wouldn’t fit our team. In my eyes the designer should be the one keeping the vision of the game because the designer designs the game, simply being a manager doesn’t justify this task. It’s hard for me to post a concrete artifact of what I’ve done. So instead of that I’m going to post a picture of our game play and talk about our general design. Something I want to mention is our aesthetic goals which are the fundamentals of the game. And these aesthetic goals should be achieved through a harmony between code, art and design. It has been my job to make this work. The way I’ve been doing this has been through testing and communicating feedback to my team members.
The combat system is pretty generic right now. We have melee enemies and we have ranged enemies who both have editable movement and fire-patterns. We use a life system rather than a HP system to give an arcade feeling. The way you acquire more lives is through score. Score can be obtained in 2 ways, by killing enemies and by collecting fish food. The fish food falls randomly from the top of the tank and DE spawns when reaching the bottom. This gives the player a reason to move around in the fish tank as well as a lot of room for improvement. The upgrade system is meant to make the player feel more powerful as well as providing the necessities to progress throughout the game. I’m looking for that “omg haha my fish has shotgun!” feeling. And to keep this interesting and avoid dominant strategy our upgrades has a limited amount of ammo as well as random spawns. After a set number of waves there will spawn a chest/clam which gives the player a new random gun. The player will later realize when the upgrades spawn and give the player something more to look forward to. We also have plans to implement a random drop system from enemies to give a more addictive feeling to the game where you chase the upgrades, that is however not something we’re doing in this stage of the game.
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I want my game mechanics to be relevant to each other. I want everything to have a connection. I want our game to build upon itself. The major design decisions where this has taken place in is the life system, the combat system and the upgrade system.