The theme for this game is falling, so everything goes around this word. Originally we were just designing a game that is directly related to this theme. We want our players experience the anxiety of falling. So for our final product, Hungry Slime, is an intense game that firefly related to falling——our player need to survive under the intense apple fall. The apple randomly spawned not only at the top of the screen, but also at some middle of the air. We decided to do so because it adds more randoms to the player, as they might be scared by the suddenly spawned apple in the middle air. Such can create an intense game play environment. Also we feel the need to add a reward system for players, since we discovered that this game might be fairly hard for some players to sustain a longer period of time. So we added water drop in our game to extend their play time. We also find spawn random mushroom can help us move our player from staying at a fixed point. We found that if player moves more intensively, they can feel the anxiety more, so the idea of spawn another thing rather than raindrop is fairly good idea to me. At the beginning of our game development process for our game is painful, as we are a three people’s group. Some would say that having more people is much easier because you can have an extra member in constructing game.during the alpha phase, three of us are all making games that seeks relationship with falling. For my game Mr.Bullet, I made it a shooting game, which player can shoot bullets bounce off the wall and finally hit the enemy. For that alpha game, now I consider that more like a physics puzzle game. I came to discover the core mechanics of the game is not that related to falling. In that game, players control their mouse as the direction of the agent’s gun. After clicking the left mouse, a bullet will be released and will fly following the law of physics.I can insist that bullet flying can be interpreted as falling, but for most people, I don’t think them could agree on that. So we gave up my idea and decided to work on what’s today’s final game, idea from Yixin Liang. Overall her game has significantly more relationship with our theme.
•The first thing I think about is our game is theme generated. As we learned from class, there are two kinds of game, which are mechanical generated and theme generated. For me, mechanic generated game appears harder, because it relies more on an idea which can change usual gameplay into a completely different, exotic experience for players. So we changed our game to theme based, and focused on our theme word “fall”. The other key term we thought of as we were designing the game is the Ludic Loop. Because we believe our game is relatively simple compared to most of other games. If that game is easy, players might quickly lose the desire to play more of it. This thinking forced us to design a game that is not a flow. On the other hand, flappy bird is a good example of a simple game employing ludic loop. Many people were obsessed with how hard flappy bird. They like how challenging it is and easily forget that is a fairly simple game. It cannot be denied that some 3A games also employs Ludic Loop, like Diabolo and Senior: Die Twice, but it’s more effective for a small game to catch its player for a longer time if it employs ludic loop.
•To me, what makes this game special is that it incorporates vertical jumps to several platforms in different heights. For games that resembles ours, there usually just one ground platform for players to move their character. Player just move left or right to avoid falling object. As we add more platforms, there are more strategies for players to experience. To attract our player to jump on those platforms, we spawn mushrooms and give player point reward for picking up mushroom, so it should be good.
•During our first play test, mushroom is the main issue to consider. At the beginning our mushroom were just spawning in the center. Testers says this will greatly decrease our game’s playability, so we worked to fix that and let our mushroom spawns randomly. Later as we were playing by ourselves, we found that every time we restart our game, the health bar won’t go back to full. It stays the same at where it were during the last game, so we fixed that by adding more conditions to health bar. That’s the two main issue we encountered during our play tests.
