A new year. A new team. A new game to create.
When said like that it all seems so simple, yet game development rarely is. For a ragtag team of three programmers, a designer, and a producer, we have a blessing and a curse. We lack a dedicated artist. This means we are free to create what we want gameplay wise, but on the flipside we won't have any art to back it up if the gameplay alone falls flat. However, we have enough programming power to create something fairly complex and special, so we headed into the ideation phase with high hopes.
That's the thing about ideas though, they are cheap and anyone can make one. Many of our ideas fell into this category. Two stood above the rest when all was said and done, a 2D Survival Game and a Guild Management Simulator. We had also considered a form of Tower Defense, but some of the ideas were adapted into a potential direction for the Survival Game. Art wise, these games could be rough, but we plan on sticking to a simpler, almost pixel art style to keep the art load low but still presentable.
The Survival Game is fairly simple on the outside, survive the dangers present in the world around you. The complexity comes in with our potential design directions. The dominant choice right now is to have a city system. The player could enter the cities and interact with the townsfolk, but ultimately have to head back into the wild after and indeterminate amount of time. The cities themselves would change overtime as well, with some cities completely disappearing off the map due to some natural disaster. We have also considered having base building that must be defending from roaming enemies. Possible settings include post-apocalyptic for something closer to Earth or a Rim World for a more science fiction feel.
The Guild Management Simulator is the idea I am the most attached to and have contributed the most to design wise. Set in a Fantasy or Medieval setting, you are the Guild Master ad you must recruit adventurers to help you complete jobs and clear out dungeons to keep the guild running. It's a two part game. On the management side you send adventurers out to autonomously complete jobs given to you by Non-Player Characters(NPCs), maintain and build up the guild, as well as recruit new members. You can decide what rooms you want in the guild to best maximize your members effectiveness and where they are located. There will be a main hall in which you can choose a specialization that will help the guild attract more members, make more money, or somewhere in-between. This room can be customized as well which might have an effect on how effective your specialization is. On the other side is the combat missions. These take place in the Dungeon, a multi-tiered structure found in the city that is infested with monsters. The combat system will be a variation on the standard Real Time Strategy (RTS) style gameplay. Defeating a combat mission earns great rewards than those normally received from sending your guild members on jobs. It also unlocks the next floor of the Dungeon and allows you to send parties of adventurers to clear the defeated floors. This game would benefit from both a 2D or 3D style, and the one that is chosen will greatly influence how we design the game later on if we chose to go forward with it.
We hope to have both prototypes done by this time next week so we can make our decision on which game to move forward with. And then the real fun begins.
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