Game 1 design process (catch up post - Part 2)

     

Once I had some reference stuff set up for my game I went to work thinking of a story for its background.

Keeping it fairly simple, the idea was that there was a little tar bubble happy in his home tar pit, when a passing dinosaur stomped into it and sent the tar bubble flying off into the distance. Now you have to get the tar bubble back home.

I started thinking about GUI elements that could be added into the game, the most obvious one being a timer. Then I thought in addition to a timer I could add a motive decay. Searching around on the net for things that could affect a tar bubble negatively I found the concept of "baking". Baking is what happens to a viscous material when it heats up and dries out too much. In other words, don't leave your tar bubble out in the sun for too long. Perfect! So my tar bubble's motive decay is "baking" and in order to stop it from baking you need to direct the tar bubble through a water puddle to re-wet it.

I also wanted to give the tar bubble some difficulties in getting back home, so some obstacles to avoid or jump over would work. I liked the idea of having a prickly thorn bush which would physically bounce the bubble back if he hit it.

And of course there are the ever present dangers of dinosaurs in the area - both from stomping feet which would squish the bubble, and biting dino heads which would pop him. Maybe he needs a life counter as well?

Anyway here is the original concept stuff for the game:

After that I started working on some maps for the game. The original idea was to have a series of maps starting with a very simple one and ending up with a very complex one to reach home, and along the way the different mechanics are introduced - motive decay, obstacles, and enemies.

Here are the original maps:

Now, what I didn't take into consideration with these maps was the fixed camera aspect. The maps, when joined together, are super long and it would have been next to impossible to get a fixed camera to see the entire thing, and still make out the bubble and his movement. This was made painfully apparent when I put all the maps together and started blocking out the path.

It started looking even more impossible when I took it to 3D.

Version one of the scene was a mass of spheres everywhere (being the bushes that bound the path) however I did learn how to drop things on an array in 3DS Max, so that was good.

Version two of the scene I started removing the spheres to make a modular bounding path instead using an extrusion. I gave up at this point because all that took me well over an hour to do.

The end result being: map most likely not workable in this format with a fixed camera.

Dagnabbit!