Final presentation

The final presentation went well, but as we realized early on in the project, we did not have enough time in this short project to realize all of our ideas for mechanics and functions in the game. Developing the game, especially everything related to making the AI function well, took much longer than expected which resulted in our demo not having perfectly fleshed out mechanics. However, I believe we presented our ideas well and I'm happy we chose to make the game that we did, I believe we all learned a lot during this project because of the tight schedule combined with our quite ambitious ideas of how the game would be based around AI.

My contributions to this project have been primarily to implement pathfinding, doing level design, and designing art assets related to the level design, as well as handling most of the documentation and the game development document.

All in all this course was fun and I feel like I learned a lot about a subject I previously knew little about. My one complaint about the course is the short span of it, which made it quite stressful at times.

Game design document and business plan

During the last week of this project I have focused mostly on finalizing the game development document and making sure that all the details of the game are clearly presented. This also includes finalizing our business plan, which will be to sell the game at a reasonably low price, comparable to the price points of other indie manager style games which generally hover around $10. Using data from steamspy.com we have gathered that manager style games are an undersaturated market with relatively few titles indicating that finding a market share should be, relative to other genres, pretty easy.

We are also exploring the idea of adding purchasable cosmetics which would alter the appearance of your units that would be sold cheaply. But as cosmetics generally only sell well in online multiplayer games this would be an addition that would most likely be added along with multiplayer which is not currently a feature of the game at this point.

Progress

On the status update presentation on the 23rd we didn't receive a lot of feedback. The presentation did however get us to sit down and thoroughly think through how to progress with our game. Our ideas are much clearer now. We have decided on five roles for the units with distinct roles and features, decided on remaking the map as bigger and divided into three lanes, two side lanes that are focused around much cover and short range combat, and a middle lane that is more open and works well for longer range combat.

For the tactics side of the game we have decided on the scope for the demo being that you can create subgroups within your team and decide what objective you want them to take. For the manager side we have decided on the following features and mechanics: training units to improve their attributes, purchasing new units, a currency system where you gain money after winning a match which can be spent on purchasing gear and players, a league system for the player to progress through, and injuries or death that can happen to units.

First demo

We have a have now had our first demo of our project which resulted in us getting plenty of valuable feedback on directions to take with our game. Most importantly we learned the importance of starting the project in a way so that playing the game is fun before you iron out the details of the game. Our demo was focused on showing off what we had so far, simple A.I and shooting mechanics. But perhaps it would have been more effective to get the tactical elements working first, rather than the simulation part. We also got some very good ideas from the audience about ways to make the tactical elements function better, for example, rock paper scissor mechanics connected to either major tactical playstyles or to individual units.

Map design

We have ironed out most of major features of our game and I have designed a draft of the map. The map design is inspired by The Colluseum in Rome. The arena features spawn points for the two teams on either side of the arena, and obstacles scattered throughout the arena to provide cover. In the middle there are three capture points for a king of the hill type game mode. At the moment only some of the sprites for the map are done so placeholders are used for many of the tiles and the map design is far from final, but hopefully it will work well for testing and early demoing purposes.

Game concept

After brainstorming concepts for our game we eventually merged some of them together and came up with the idea of a death arena game with RPG elements, where two teams face off against each other in some sort of objective based game mode in an arena containing obstacles and cover.

The main gameplay idea of the game is that the player gets to decide on a strategy for their team as well as upgrade and change their team's equipment to then see the game play out in a sort of simulation.