Game Idea research

A representation of my emotions going through the thinking process

Carrying on from last weeks post about some game idea brainstorms, this week I have whittled the ideas down to just one that I will work on for the coming weeks. This took a lot of thought, research and consistently annoying friends and family over the past week, trying to get them to read my ideas and get some feedback, or figure out which one they like best.

I've decided to go with the game idea called Tomb Town. This idea was the most popular;lar when it came to asking friends and family, many people loved the idea of traveling around the tow and forest as well as all the collectable items.  Honestly I'm not too sure if this idea was also popular because everyone is in a spooky mood due to halloween being literally around the corner. Either way,  I'm happy with my choice ( wether I will be able to say that in a couple of weeks, is something we will have to wait and see)

This week, I was trying to come up with different game mechanics and three ways that the game could work.


Basic RPG

The first idea that I came up with was a basic RPG structure. This is the structure I suggested in my brainstorming post, and also what is scribbled about in my design notebook... it's everywhere!
For this idea, the players character would travel throughout the town, collecting items that they can trade for coins or use in future quests. There would be tasks that NPCs can give the character, in order to move through the town or area. Some NPCs would be more difficult to find then others. 
Throughout the town there are houses, shops and other buildings you can explore, learning the lore of the town and about the final skeleton wizard.

A tutorial by jimmy vegas that I think would be useful!

Level based 

This would be similar enough to the RPG, with collectable coins and items, there would be certain tasks that have to be able to move on to the next playable level. Certain tasks would also lead to side quest levels, levels that aren't essentially but do increase your knowledge or are just for fun!

Achievement based

For this idea, there would be a set amount of tasks that have to be completed before the player can move on. Each task would add more to a fillable task bar, which when full, adds an extra area on the map. 
With this, there would also be a set amount of items that have to be collected and also if a task is not completed correctly, the player would have to repeat the task.

Out of all of these ideas, I think I would be able to flesh out the RPG idea more then the rest, including elements of the level and achievement based game.

signing off
-AK

Image:
found on boredart.com

Unty Tutorial 02

This week's tutorials (By Jimmy Vegas) focused mainly on refining certain parts of our graphics and placing a cursor on the gameplay canvas.

I really enjoyed watching the tutorials, because it really showed how easy it can be to create a good looking game, with just some other basic knowledge of code and adding textures
The first tutorial helped with making collection graphics and adding audio and script. I found this really interesting because I plan on using a lot of item collections within my own game that I will be making.
I also like that he taught us the code on how to make the objects rotate, giving the game that next layer of detail.

I did however find the coding difficult to understand at first. Although I have some experience with coding for websites, so HTML and CSS, C# was something that I haven't even heard about before I started watching these tutorials. I find that the layout of this code is slightly similar to CSS coding layout, so it took me a little while to switch my brain over to learning this new code.

Learning to add water and walls was also something I really enjoyed learning about. Again like the gem, I found it good to see objects and pieces of terrain that I want to use in my own game, being explained simply. The fact that you can change the way the wall looks and even the length of your shadows is really helpful.

The second video was about raycast and cursor. I will definitely have to go back over this Video because i didn't really understand the purpose of the ray cast, but being able to place the cursor on the gameplay was very helpful even from a game developer point of view. This made it much easier to be able to tell what way you were going to move and ill really improve the UI of the game.

Signing off
-AK

photo found on pinterest