Chosen idea / Final ideas

This blog post will give a brief run down on our chosen game ideas, and a brief summary of some of the mechanics that I worked on.

After deep thought and consideration, the team and I decided the dodgeball game has more potential.

A few reasons for this:

• It's definitely about multiplayer gameplay, even though at the start we were unsure how we wanted the style of multiplayer if we wanted it to be local or online, how many players etc... we originally thought to make it something like 5v5 so it would be just like real life dodgeball with multiple players to eliminate.

We ended up choosing 1v1 horizontal split-screen.

• level genre, as seen on the whiteboard notes above we have a list of the different themes that we can choose between. When making this list at the beginning, we were thinking that the theme changes per level, meaning we would have different abilities and playstyle. As if we did the wizard theme we could've had it so the players are flying around on broomsticks (harry potter style). one of the obvious problems that we would have with this design would be time management as if we wanted to do this is would result in poor quality of work as we would have less time for each element.

After some consideration, the team decided on making the genre Pirate vs tribal and sticking to the one level, unless we managed to get ahead of the schedule, but we wanted to make sure we would have a high-quality outcome at the end year.

• gameplay mechanic

For the actual gameplay, the team and I had many great ideas on how to make our game a unique experience.

Weapon

when first thinking of the game we had no idea what the player will use to fire the 'dodgeballs' or how they will even move around.

For the weapon, it would obviously be based around the theme/aesthetic that we pick, so this was something that got decided later on.

After we figure the theme out which was pirates vs tribal, we came up with the design of a cannon-style of weapon.

This then led to thinking about how we wanted the weapon to work, as we thought about making it so all the ammo spawns at the centre of the map at the start and there are just 3 balls throughout the game. Or to have it so the player starts with ammo, and they are equally matched at the start.

We did decide to go for both players to start off with 3 rounds of ammo each.

The balls will also have a feature where the ball will lose damage over distance, making the player need to move forwards toward the centre of the map. However, as the map decreased in size when designing the game, and how we've made the game more fast pace, that feature kind of became unrelated, but we still kept it in the game, just to stop people staying right at the back or camping.

movement

For the player's movement, we have set it to be pretty generic controls. As is it a split-screen game it won't be a mouse and keyboard, so we have set it to be an Xbox controller.

The players will move at a set speed but will be able to dash sideways to dodge the ball however this will be on a cooldown. This would either be some sort of quick-time event or will just be something they can do any time but just on a cooldown.

The team then decide the best way for this dash to work, which would be for it to be on cooldown, meaning the player can just press a button and they will dash to the side, on a short couple of seconds burst. (This was worked on by the other Programmer in my team Abbie Hipwell)

points / game progression

for this game, there wouldn't be a point system instead, it would be on who gets the most hits on their opponent. this will be displayed by the barrier which will move to a set point on either side. this decreases the player's playspace making them more of a target.

we did still want to keep some of the real-life dodgeball rules in the game giving new gamers and players some base knowledge on how the game might work.

such as having to gut all or most of the other team members out to win, but we would have it on a timer so it is an intense/fast-paced gameplay experience.

power-ups and how we are going to prevent players from camping

we would also have power-ups spawning either at the barrier or around the playspace, making the players run out to collect them, this would make them an easier target, but if successful will give them an advantage. The power-ups will be randomised. the power-up code was made to prevent player predictability