Essential Experience: The first step on this journey was to come up with a essential experience that my game would revolve around, for time to time parts of this experience would need to be adjusted and fine tuned a bit, but I have ended up with this:
Having creative freedom to explore and interact with the environment allowing you to get to your objective in a unique and rewarding way. (The more you play the more freedom you have)
What I mean by this is the game I want to make isn't going to be linear in its level design. It might be smaller and have a set goal but I want the player to have a refined sandbox experience letting them tackle the objective in multiple unique ways.
Game Ideas:
From my essential experience I had to develop some game ideas of what my game could actually be. This could be themes, gameplay mechanics or narratives. I just needed to make sure the idea was still open and I hadn't closed in my ideas. So I came up with four general ideas from my essential experience: 1.Infiltration:
Making your way into a specific part of the map (maybe encompasses themes of Stealth mechanics) – I like the idea of this game worlds environment being inaccessible to an ‘average’ person
2.Repair/ maintenance:
You have get to/ fix broken objects to fix them but they are in hard to reach and strange areas. – the idea that these jobs are so odd and in strange places you’ve been called in to fix them.
3.Race across an urban environment:
This one is pretty self explanatory (I want the movement for this to be heavily parkour inspired) … - making your own shortcuts to beat opponents would be cool
4.Runaway: Getting away from pursuers via your ability to traverse the environment – your outnumbered and getting cornered but can still escape.
After getting feed back there was a lot of praise of how these ideas fit with the essential experience, so I decided to keep working on all of them and see which develops into the best game idea.
Gameplay Loops:
the next step was to talk about the actual game play of each game and how it will achieve the goals set for the game by the essential experience at the games origin. Each game idea needed a unique and interesting twist on the three steps in a cycle of gameplay presented to us.
1. Activity and risk
2. Reward
3. Opportunity
1.Infiltration: -Reach the terminal in a restricted building, Getting caught will result in you having to run away (failing to do so will make you lose the level)
-Getting to know more about the story and uncover a mystery.
-Unlocking levels with more complex design allowing you to challenge yourself at the art of espionage.
2.Repair/ maintenance: -repair broken part of a building/ structure that is normally unreachable by normal traversal, failing means you don’t get the money for completing the job and therefore can’t develop
-With the money you get for completing said jobs you can fund research and development of your inventions making the job of your repairs more interesting and complex…
-Harder jobs on more complex building are now available to take leading to more varied gameplay, where you will find multiple new ways to use the interesting inventions you’ve made.
3.Race across an urban environment:
-Race against an opponent, better (and faster) paths to the objective being more risky. This gives the sense you can always catch up.
-Once you beat an opponent you can challenge harder opponents and you will get a good sense of development of skills, also you get ‘ghosts’ of your best time so you can compete with others for the best time.
-This opens up the idea that not only it’s about you besting and conquering the game but competition between others making the paths that you use more of a personal choice. Opening parts of the game up for discourse.
4.Runaway:
-Get away from guards or cops by using parkour and movement to out manoeuvre them and escape the scene of a heist. If you get caught you fail you fail and lose money.
-Once you escape with the money you can use it to upgrade and further increase your ability to move through the environment.
-The move successful missions means you go for harder heists in more built up and densely packed areas, this means more guards, more built up environment and therefore more diversity in the ways you can escape the cops.
these loops give both me the designer as well as others a better understanding of what it is that is being made, allowing better feedback and better development to follow.
[At this point I still feel like each of these concepts could develop really well so I will keep pressing on. Although I do wish to whittle at least one of these ideas out over the next week or so as it will help narrow down my focus into my ideas.]
The last step on this process was to visualise the previous step and to allow these ideas to take a more literal form in the style of a story board that will capture the essence of the gameplay loop and the stages of those loops.
Here is the storyboard for one of the idea i want to carry forward, the main thing i wanted to get across is to think outside the box... taking the focus away from the building in a concept which started about fixing parts on buildings, in all honesty i started making this thinking i would use a drain pipe to get up to the roof but I think this just fits better.