Gungineer

GUNGINEER is a game concept created for an assignment with the following restrictions and criteria:

Restrictions
– 2D (But you are free to decide perspective)
– No Gravity (Not requiring a gravity system)
– PC controls (Keyboard and/or mouse)
– 10 weeks (The scope of the production time of the concept should be 10 weeks)
– No network (Not requiring network)
– Single-player (Multiplayer or Co-Op can be optional, but the game must be playable
for one player first and foremost)

Requirements
– Theme
– Minimum 1 type of projectiles
– Minimum 3 types of power ups
– High Score
– Scene (Static, auto scrolling, scrolling when player move, move between scenes)

The group was assigned by the course examiner. Each team was furthermore
assigned two words at random, which had to feature prominently in the game’s
design with regards to the game’s aesthetics, mechanics, and dynamics. Our group’s
assigned words were glitch and fanfaroande.

Work on this project began 10/10/14 and concluded 07/11/14. The paper prototype
was presented to the examiner on October 24th, and the pitch was presented
November 5th. Here are some highlights from our group’s design concept, GUNGINEER.

One Page Design

Elevator pitch/High Concept

Destroying waves of glitched robots in a challenging and randomly generated dungeon crawler to enhance your own ego, unlocking upgrades as you go, transforming yourself into a cyborg.

Key features

• A challenging, fast-paced dungeon crawler with puzzle elements.
• Every playthrough is unique.
• Feel like a badass as you overcome challenges and get upgrades!

Synopsis

The player takes on the role of an engineer who is on a rogue mission to shut down the robot production facilities belonging to the private galactic military company Robotnics. The player needs to infiltrate and take control of the different facilities scattered around on planet Earth in order to prevent a galactic robotic takeover threatening humanity!

Narrative

You are a robotics engineer employed by the company Robotnics who, while doing some code clean-up accidentally stumbled upon the company’s harrowing secret: behind the facade of selling and producing robotic assistants for all aspects of human life, Robotnics is secretly planning a full planetary takeover! You embark on a rogue mission to upload a series of viruses to the company mainframe in order to disable the robotic soon-to-be army, exploiting code you helped writing. However, the company’s management has been alerted to your designs and has set the robots to shoot, not stun! You must fight your way through Robotnics’ five main facilities in order to glitch out the system and stop the takeover! However, your actions also have unintended consequences. As you upload the glitches, the robots begin to malfunction… with unforeseen results!

At the center of each facility is a powerful robot protecting the local mainframe. After taking it out, you find Robotnics’ top of the line, next gen upgrades, which, due to the forces against you, you decide apply… to yourself. I mean, one robotic arm-cannon or cybernetic leg is worth it, if it helps you take down these robots, right…?

Gameplay

Gungineer is a dungeon crawler with partially randomly generated maps, enemies, rewards and puzzles. The primary gameplay is played from a top down view where the player has to enter rooms and clear these rooms of enemies. The enemies will try to either shoot or perform melee attacks on the player, depending on the enemy type, which the player needs to dodge in order to proceed in the game and not lose health. The rooms all have different layouts, and different enemies and rewards in them. All of these attributes are partially randomized, so that one play through will not be exactly like the previous one.

Room system and gameplay modes
Each level features a maze-like map which at first is hidden from the player. The map consists of rooms and the player discovers the map by entering these rooms. The end goal of each map is to defeat the map’s randomly selected boss in order to proceed to the next level.

Every map has a door that is locked, which cuts off the access to the remaining part of the map where the boss is located. To unlock this door the player needs to glitch the door’s software. The player will have to solve a puzzle in order to unlock the preform the glitch. This glitch opens the door and the player can proceed to the next part of the map, however, this also increases the difficulty of the game since glitching the door causes all the robots around the map to get glitched. This is explained in more depth later. Examples of puzzles are:

• Memory mini-game puzzle.
• Pipeline-like mini-game puzzle.
• Quicktime event mini-game puzzle.

Some puzzles feature mini-games which is the a secondary game mode, where the camera view is changed from a top-down view to a 2D view of a circuit board.

Other puzzles require the player to explore the map and find a keycard to unlock a door. These doors are not the same as the door that requires the player to glitch them. These door are marked with either a red or a yellow color, and the door requires a keycard with a corresponding color. Behind these doors the player might find treasure or a miniboss that drops an upgrade. These key cards spawns in a random room when the room is cleared from enemies. A red keycard cannot spawn behind a red locked door (incompleteable permutations not allowed).

The Glitch: Increasing the difficulty
When the player glitches a door (completes a minigame puzzle), two things will happen:

The corresponding glitch door will be unlocked, so that the player can access the boss room and thus proceed to the next level. The boss room can not spawn in the area that is initially available to the player. The player must complete the puzzle in order to get access to the area where the boss room spawns.

The glitch will spread and affect all of the remaining robots. This means that the robots behavior is altered in a way that makes them more dangerous and unpredictable. A robot that previously tried to shoot the player will now behave in a crazy and less predictable manner. The robot might try to both shoot and grab the player instead of just trying to shoot her. Other behavioral changes to the robots’ AI involve the robots trying to perform suicide attacks on the player, exploding in the close vicinity of the player, dealing damage.

Player Stats

The player has five different stats that can be altered in different ways.

• Hit Points
• Movement Speed
• Projectile Damage
• Rate of Fire

There are three ways that the player can get upgrades in the game: loot drops, treasure drops, and via the Ego system.

The Ego-system
The Ego-system is one of the two ways for the player to unlock upgrades. The Ego system is displayed to the player via a Ego-meter (EM) that shows the player how many Ego points (EP) she currently has. The player obtains these EP by killing enemies, solving puzzles or completing entire levels. These points are used to obtain power-ups called Ego Perks, that help the player in combat. The EM is divided by five different Ego Perk thresholds. When each threshold is reached, the player gains an Ego-Perk.

The EM stretches from 0 EP all the way up to 50 points. The player can not acquire more than 50 EP, and can’t have less than 0 EP. Each threshold is reached when the player has 6, 14, 23, 35 and 50 EP. Every time a threshold is reached, a voiceline will play, telling the player she is doing awesome. Here are some examples of such lines.

Killing different enemies earns the player different amounts of EP, with a value ranging between one and three EP. Upon completing a puzzle, the player is rewarded with three EP.

If the player takes damage from an enemy or any other source, or if she does not solve a puzzle within the puzzle’s timeframe, the player loses between two and four EP. If the player loses enough points, she may lose an Ego Perk if the threshold is no longer reached. The Ego Perks do not change the appearance of the player – they only change the stats, and have a minor visual effect.

The five unlockable Ego-Perks are:

Loot Upgrades
When the player kills a boss, the boss spawns or drops a random upgrade for the player to pick up. These upgrades can either improve the player’s stats, change the projectiles’ behavior of the player’s weapon, or improve the effect of an Ego Perks.

Stat upgrades include, but are not limited to, slight improvement of the players’ movement speed, rate of fire, attack damage, projectile speed, maximum health and/or projectile range.

Some loot upgrades can also change the way the projectiles behave. Projectile upgrades include, but are not limited to: Player can shoot two-four projectiles at once (depending on the upgrade), projectile hitbox and damage is altered, projectile damage and color is changed.

Loot upgrades that affect the Ego Perks will increase the effect of an active Ego Perk. E.g. the Overcharge perk might give the player a 12% damage boost instead of a 10% damage boost. Loot upgrades are the only upgrades that can visually change the appearance of the payer avatar.

Examples of loot upgrades are:

Treasure
Like any dungeon crawler, Gungineer has treasure to stimulate and reward player exploration. There are several types of ‘treasure’ that can spawn on the map:

Treasure has a much higher chance of spawning directly behind a locked door. The corresponding key card must be found elsewhere on the level to open a locked door. The player can only hold two items at a time. Items that the player does not pick up or drops will remain on the map. The player can pick up items by walking up to them and interacting with E key or RMB. The keys will display as a little popup with the words “Pick up [item name]?” to make sure the player understands. If a player already has two items and picks up a third, the first item in their item slots will drop, yielding a visible animation. The picked up item will be placed in slot two, and the item from slot two will move to slot one. This way, the player can simply and easily manage their held items by cycling through dropped items in this fashion.

Challenges

The challenges presented to the player involve shooting enemies, dodging enemy projectiles, avoiding enemies, managing the Ego-meter and solving puzzles.

Example level design for first level (assigned playthrough time limit 10-15 minutes/level):

The Glitch puzzle spawn location is important. Completing a Glitch puzzle will grant access to the boss room, but also make any remaining enemies on the level more difficult to kill. This serves as an impetus to our player to explore the entire map before returning to complete the Glitch puzzle. Therefore, the Glitch puzzle should ideally not spawn either too close to the starting position or the Boss room – particularly for the first level the player faces. In this example of a first level map, the Glitch puzzle is placed somewhat in the center: enough rooms exist between it and the Boss room to punish the player should they solve the puzzle immediately rather than continue exploring, but neither do we intentionally sabotage the player by spawning it too early. One possible solution would be to have the puzzle room spawn after y amount of rooms the player has already visited, where x<y<z .

The game levels will be randomly generated so that each playthrough is unique. However, this does not mean “anything goes.” There will naturally be limitations and structures programmed into the random generation, so that the starting room doesn’t end up containing the boss, for example, or so that a red keycard doesn’t end up behind a locked red door.

Aesthetic Goals

Goal one:
Exploration: The player wants to, or feels the need to explore the entire map in order to gain more Ego-Points, more powerful Perks, and find useful treasures. Every playthrough will feel unique and not like the previous.

Goal two:
Challenge: The player feels the need to complete the game, have the perfect play session.

Goal three:
Badassery: The player is rewarded for overcoming difficult challenges.

Examples of in-game enemies and concept art:

Ripomatic:

Art by:

http://www.foxbergart.com/

http://teroniborg.wordpress.com/

Oscar Davidsson

About Dee Majek

2014  Programming

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