Changing Game Idea/ Game Proposal

LAC13344231
James Lacey
Game Design

Changing Game Idea/ Game Proposal

Introduction: In this document I will discuss changing my idea and creating a new game proposal.

Sections 

1. Why am I changing my idea?
2. Base idea of game
3. Inspirations
   – Slenderman
   – Resident evil 2
   – Gears of war horde mode
4. Game Proposal

Why am I changing my Idea?

I want to change my Idea because I am personally finding it difficult to come up with ideas to create suspense and show my programming ability. Creating anticipation and tension is done by multiple things, sound, ui, camera changes, lighting, animations and level design. I liked my idea before but I was struggling to find assets that could be used for the idea. 

Base Idea of game:
3D Game
Three waves
Kill designated number of enemies to pass each wave, evade indestructible boss enemy
Pick up items to slow boss enemy 
Horror style first person shooter
Survival

Inspirations –

Slenderman – Slenderman is a simple take on the horror genre, find all the pages and escape slenderman. Slenderman will randomly generate close to your position, each page will increase the refresh frequency and speed of slenderman. When note 3 is collected an eerie slow drum beat sounds and slenderman chases you more aggressively. Tv buzzing noises will play when closed or slenderman in vision, if you are too close or look at slender he will kill you.

Best Features of game design in game:

1. Enemy combat – One of the greatest assets of slenderman is the combat, the idea of having an enemy that you need to run from but can’t look at is the perfect enemy because he can sneak up on you. Slenderman adds that element that the player cannot just stand still or hide for fluid gameplay.
2. Level Design – Escaping slenderman, to defeat the game you need to use the trees to block slendermans vision from him getting to you but it also makes it easy to get lost and go in circles when you get chased. This is good because it makes navigating and finding the pages hard. Pages are located around the map some outside and some in building, these building seen in 1.0 have tight hallways and use common scary places (e.g bathroom, long tunnels)
3. Sound Design – The creepy and eerie crunching of grass and the unexpected loud radio signal sounds when you slenderman is near. The deep breaths of the player also adds to the immersion.
4. Lighting – The dark makes it harder to navigate with only the use of a flashlight, so when you hear slenderman and not see him it adds that element of fear to the player not knowing where he is. 

Bad features of game design?

1. Player Movement – The movement of the player is really slow and clucky, I would personally change it so the player could move faster because however moving slow may be scary it’s also annoying. I think this has more chance of deterring the player from playing again than it being fun.

Creative Influence 
I am going to use slenderman as a heavy influence and the functions that it has in them and try to replicate in my own version. As Identified in the inspirations, to make this possible I am going to have to focus on the Enemy AI, lighting, level design and sound design.

Slenderman evidence

1.1 (Bathroom building)

1.2 (Tunnels)

1.3 (Youtube video eight page slenderman playthrough)

Resident Evil 2 – This game includes multiple different features that helped me when thinking of making the game more fun. Mr X is a great example of this, aside from the base enemies which you can kill, Mr X is indestructible and the player has to run away from him. Both enemies alone are easy to get round but together they push the player to think tactically where they go to complete the level. 

Gears of War Horde Mode: 

Horde mode is a wave based survival where one player or a team has to survive 50 waves of enemies. Various power ups and different weapon power ups are available to kill the enemies . The best aspect of the game mode is the pacing of enemies through the rounds and it’s a simple kill all the enemies and survive the rounds(It doesn’t make the game too complex).

Using the inspirations I want to make a wave based first person horror experience

Basic Functions – 

“Base Idea of game:
3D Game
Three waves
Kill designated number of enemies to pass each wave, evade indestructible boss enemy
Pick up items to slow boss enemy 
Horror style first person shooter
Survival”

Location of the game?
Gated section of the woods (A dream in the players head) 

Type of camera?
First Person 

Lighting?
Only lighting will be a flashlight

What areas am I going to include?
I want to include some building like slender man did to add to the gameplay

Classroom
Hospital Cubicle
Bathroom/toilet
Living Room
Bridge
Stable 
Car

Going to source some of these from free assets I find online

Player Mechanics 
Controls – WASD to move and mouse to look round
Enemy boss – if player looks at boss for too long he will die
Health Bar – Player will have 100 health if that reaches 0 player dies

Enemy mechanics 
Enemy Attack – Deals damage to players health when close enough 
Enemy Movement – Follows the player 
Enemy Boss movement – Randomly generates near the player near the player 
Enemy boss jump sequence – When player dies camera pans and zooms on boss and player dies

Combat mechanics
Flashlight – Player uses flashlight beam to kill basic enemies
Enemy- Base enemy will follow player, when close will deal damage to the player
Boss Enemy – If the player looks at the boss for too long the player will die triggering the enemy boss jump scare.

User Interface
Player health Bar – health bar updates when player has been attacked
Wave counter – updates what wave player is on
Enemy Boss warning – When entering the third round, UI will appear warning the player eg “Don’t look at him or he takes your sight”
Flashlight – If flashlight is turned off, text will appear to guide player to press “F key” to turn it back on

Sound mechanics
Footsteps – footstep sounds when the player moves
Basic Enemy- Scream sound when enemy dies 
Boss enemy-  Sounds plays when boss enemy is in sight
Wave 1 – Silent(woods sounds)
Wave 2 – Silent Screams when enemies die
Wave 3 – Intense faster pace music plays 

Goal – Kill all the enemies in each wave and survive

How will each round progress?

Wave 1 – Round one is the starting round which should get the player use killing the enemies
Wave 2 – Will make the enemies a little bit harder and will startle player when they scream
Wave 3 – This should surprise the player when the enemy boss appears and because this wave is going to be a lot harder, I made the amount of enemies to kill smaller. This however will make it more intense because it will let the player know the enemy boss is formidable 

In conclusion, I have modified my idea to something which I feel more comfortable developing and have more ideas for. I feel like the change in ideas and stronger influences of example inspirations create a more structured planned idea. Now that I have created a proposal, I am going to create a sequence diagram for game.

References 

Click to access L-G-0002382274-0003490062.pdf

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