Friday, September 21, 2012

Game Dev 1: Pitch, Fallen, and Game Maker

This post will be catch up to what I am doing in the development process in Game Dev 1... The class Game Dev 1 (Film 3710) is basically making a game in a semester using a pre-existing engine (Unity, Unreal, Game Maker, Game Salad, etc). The game will usually be in the fashion of a flash game-esque and won't be as expansive as I would like. Though a semester to make a game is better than 2 - 4 weeks. This development process will be from pitch, to game design document, to development, to testing, to release. My team is already doing level design and working out game flow and the mechanics of the game, so I will go through of my initial pitch.

Pitch:

About 2 weeks ago from this posting, I gave my pitch for a game I made up on the spot (I was just happy to do someone else's game). The reason for this is because, I do have some great ideas for games that I will present for my capstone project and maybe a person project (If I can become good friends with an artist).

My game idea came for the idea of a Halloween costume. I love steampunk, and I too love Victorian attire (especially an aristocrat with the top hat, cane, and monocle). So I decided to go as Death if he were an English gentleman. This costume is just the Aristocrat attire with a skull face mask and a skull cane. The main character in my game would be death in his attire. A soul was able to escape from the Underworld and escape to the world above and posses many humans. Death must go above and reclaim that which he lost while trying to either kill or save those who are possessed. This game is a 2D side scroller and relies heavily on visual gags. This was a game I would not make (I probably would save the character of Death for a different game), but need to give a pitch for a grade.

For the actual pitch, since I didn't care for my idea I decided to rely on showmanship and dressed up as my Halloween costume. I was the only one to show up and I did receive some positive feedback about the game. Not surprisingly, I didn't go ahead with the idea. When teams of 3 were formed, we decided to make a different game (one for the better).

Fallen:

We formed into teams of three (1 programmer, 1 artist, and 1 producer). This setup does worry me a bit since I am the only programmer and will have to do all that responsibility for the entire game. I was initially thinking that when we got into the teams of 3, we would improve the game idea and present that to the class, and the professor would merge some teams together to have a bigger development team, but as time goes on I doubt it more and more.

When my team met, we decided not to do any of our ideas and form an idea from a genre that we all love (RPG). We decided to center our game around a fallen angel who has fallen to depths of hell and must escape.

Elevator Pitch:
Thrown out of heaven for somewhat trivial reasons, an Angel finds himself at the bottom of the 10 realms of the underworld. Fighting his way back to the surface the angel must choose to seek vengeance or offer mercy to those he believes has wronged/betrayed him. Fallen is a Action RPG 2D Platformer with puzzles to solve, demons to fight, bosses to suppress and a choice between good and evil to make.
I really like this idea, since it allows us to really get into the visuals and atmosphere. It will also allow me to practice my coding experience on platformers. I believe that if this is done correctly, then it will be an awesome game.


The game is an RPG because the player can choose between three trees (Vengeance, Justice, and Mercy) which represent warrior (melee), ranger (ranged), and mage (magic) respectively. The player can level up each tree and will have a certain weapon that goes with each one (sword with Vengeance, bow with Justice, and staff with Mercy). We are still deciding how a player can switch between the trees or if they can select just one tree at the beginning and they are either Vengeance, Justice, or Mercy.

At the start of the game, the player starts in the bottom of Hell where he must climb out. He faces tougher and tougher demons as he levels up. When he escapes the pit, he has a choice if he will join the demons and invade Heaven and exact revenge on the angel who cast him out. Or rejoin the angels after a brief confrontation and go back to the pit and destroy hell. This will most likely leave a cliffhanger for a sequel that will most never happen.

There are some pitfalls that I do forsee and have currently seen my teammates and myself make. That is we make this game too big. The scope of this game is an epic adventure like most other RPG's. If we had the time and resources this game could have been a AAA game that was fully 3D open world RPG (much like Dragon Age). The choices can be more integrated to show a transform into either a fallen (dark) angel or an archangel (good) both equally as powerful. Like with everything, we won't be able to put everything we want in, but with only a semester for a development time that will be even more so.

Game Maker:

Because we have only a Semester to this game I cannot make this game as I have made it in the past using an IDE and a language (C# using XNA or C++ using QT). I am forced to use a pre-existing engine such as Unity, Unreal SDK, Game Maker, or Game Salad.

I really want to use either Unity or Unreal SDK because their tools are just simply awesome and the scripts they use are actually languages (for example javascript and C# are used for Unity). Game maker uses a bastardized language called GML and Game Maker doesn't even have a scripting language you can use. In fact, one person even went as far as saying "Meet the startup that is going to make programming a thing of the past." The Article. The reason I can't use Unity or Unreal is because they are 3D engines and don't do 2D. You can technically do 2D since its just 3D, but the loss of a dimension but it won't have that flash feel to it and would be awkward to program. I tried Game Maker and even though its alright, I really would rather not use it. If I could, I would like to use Flashbuilder to make this game, but I would need another programmer or more time to do that. Therefore, I have to use Game Maker for this semester.

Game Maker is you drag and drop program for those who don't have any programming experience. While it does have a scripting language (GML) which is similar to javascript, its rather clunky and finding documentation for it was the biggest pain in the ass. There are ways to make this game without writing a single line of code, but it would be similar to how Scratch writes code and that you drag a block of code into a window that does a certain command, a conditional, or a loop. It takes all the joy out of programming and the feel of accomplishment when your eternal fight against the OS and compiler has a temporary victory when a block of code starts to work.

That is all for now. I'll write again in the next development phase, when my team has planned out the flow of the game and the layout of each level.

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