Speaking of the aesthetic goals, we wanted the player to have a fantasy and challenging experience overall. In ancient Japan, a girl named the Peach Girl, who was born in a peach, began her adventure because the evil boss Oni took away her soulmate the Peach Boy. In the game, as the Peach Girl, the player goes on a journey to save Peach Boy. Along her adventure, the Peach girl will encounter a huge number of monsters with different kinds: red-faced Oni attacks you with a wooden club, whereas the blue-faced monster throws stones to damage her. The game loop is perhaps that the player fights the monsters, to get stronger, and stay alive to fight more monsters. In this way, the player would be well-prepared to defeat the final boss. The boss Oni has binary attacking model throw a fireball when the player is far from it or hits the Peach Girl with the mace when being near her. However, the player will find it more difficult to kill the boss Oni than normal monsters, as that is our goal to bring the challenging experience for the player. Therefore, when you kill the boss Oni, you can save the Peach Boy.
Our gameplay goal that makes the players interacting with game mechanics is by clear visual representation on the game. As a result, when creating this game, we focused not only on game logics but also on our artwork. We drew all the characters, animations, and assets except for the boss in the game. Also, we gave each character several animations, such as walking, jumping, attacking, all of which we drew. The other reason why we drew all of these is that characters online could not match our initial intention. In the end, we choose pix art as our drawing style since, based on the lecture, the less detail gives the player more space for imagination. Also, by referring to the class, we used what we learned from the lecture to balance the “story” and “mechanics”. We wanted to make the Peach Girl and the Peach Boy and monster with an ancient oriental feel to make the storyline interesting. Therefore, we chose an ancient Asian style background and there. Also, we made the boss other monsters have similar shapes but different sizes to distinguish them and made normal monsters to have the same shapes but different colors. In doing so, we pursued unity and diversity at the same time for the game.
Like the mechanics that many other games shared, the Peach Girl can walk (left arrow, right arrow buttons), run (up arrow button), attack (z-button), and dodge (x-button). The Peach Girl can reduce her damage according to her defense power and cause damage to the monsters based on her attack power. Based on what we talked about in the class, we could not affect the player experience directly but by manipulating the mechanics, so that is the reason we added fun mechanics to make the game experience better. Also, from the feedback from playtesting by other peers, we modified our game in several ways. First of all, we allowed the Peach Girl to dodge can avoid incoming attacks by pressing x-button and made the player action (walking, attacking, and jumping) much smoother. Besides, by adding multiple rooms, we have “hyperlinks” that discussed in lecture. Moreover, we originally had only one type of monster, but we made two types of monsters with the action of hitting with the club and throwing the stone, respectively to make the game better. Also, we added a wall to prevent the player from falling off the edge. In the past, when the user makes the decision, the monster didn’t stop the attack. We heard peers said that this prevented users from making a choice, so we updated the monsters to let the users pause for a while until they made a choice. The most important mechanics we added is the feedback for the player to notice the damage. By implementing these mechanics, the player would know when they are being hurt by the other monsters.
Unlike other Action games that use player’s EXP for levelling up, what makes our game innovative is the sacrificing/saving mechanics: the player can have a chance to make a moral decision whether to sacrifice or save the monster after killing it, to make the Peach Girl stronger. This decision affects the player’s attack or defense power. Also, this score determines how much the player will be attacked and attacked. In ordinary games, these scores change. Therefore, it might take quite a while for players to feel the change on their stats.
