Our original idea was to have a fast paced, battle royale game set on floating islands influenced by weather. Apart from the environment though, there was very little set in stone the first couple of weeks. Even as far as art style went, it wasn’t clear whether we were going to go for a more painting inspired style or a classic fantasy style.
Because of this very flexible concept, there was little change throughout the quarter. Our creative energy went more towards exploring game features and game balancing. The major components (weather, attack methods, winning conditions, and powerups) stayed the same.
During implementation we fleshed out the initial idea which was a bit vague. Our final project design was more concrete and had many more implementation details, such as:
As far as gameplay goes, we settled with a minimalistic set of 2 weather events and introduced gameplay variation not as a huge number of attack types but as a set of power ups that couldn’t be used at the same time.
We also added score decay in order to keep the players from all occupying the central island with no progress. However, this does lengthen the game a bit and after having a couple very long rounds, we allowed the score decay to decrease over time and the score gaining rate to increase.
One important feature we didn’t plan for was the character selection screen. While we did plan to have a lobby, the different models and different textures were a later decision. We felt that this was a nice touch, allowing the user to feel more involved.
Moreover, we did not originally plan for sound effects, or even different music tracks. These were put in mostly because we found we had the time to. This was, of course, making ample use of the royalty free music found online.
Finally, I think our 2D UI was pretty polished! It’s unclear whether we originally planned for it, but it was something whose design changed multiple times over the course of the quarter.
Our start was a little slow, especially for graphics, art, and physics, but once we figured out the language and the respective libraries, our team worked rather quickly. We caught up with the schedule and even surpassed it. For the graphics specifically, it was at times hard to move forward because our design kept changing. However, we made sure to continue to try things even without the designs, which made implementing the designs once we got them much easier.