Core Principles of Game Design

Game Play

Goals, challenges & rewards

A goal is a task the player has to reach to progress through the story or to get to a certain place.

In this game the goal is to kill enemies and gain experience, getting stronger to progress through the story. The challenges would be fighting all the strong enemies along the way but also having to fight bosses. The rewards from killing enemies will give you experience, gold and loot, experience helps you to level up to unlock new skills and upgrade your attributes. When they drop loot the average enemies drop common loot and less experience, whereas bosses drop more experience and more gold and XP. Gold helps you buy Armour, weapons and potions from the shop, which will help you defeat the stronger enemies.

Difficulty & Balance

Difficulty is how easy or hard the game is, balance is how good or bad a certain aspect of the game is and how well it works in conundrum with other things.

In the game there is a level/upgrade system. Potions are a feature that will help balance out combat by giving you extra stats like: Strength, more damage, less damage received, more mana etc. These help balance out the game because it helps people with combat. However, enemies scale to the players level and have increased stats based on a certain percentage of the players, boss enemies scale to the players level which makes their base stats higher than the player character, thus using potions to help level them out. Difficulty settings aren’t included in the game as having it on easy would ruin the experience. Spells like lightning, fire and life drain will all be beneficial in turning the tides of combat.

Feedback

Feedback is the audio or visual stimuli given from certain accomplishments that help immerse the player in the game.

In this game there is a combo meter, which rewards people with an extra percentile of xp based on combo hits, more combo hits makes the percentage go up, to a max of 20% This combo meter shows up on the side of the screen and changes colour when it hits a certain threshold of hits, also making a sound to let the player know they have hit the mark without having to look at it.

Visual Style

Game world

Game world is the world in which the player is surrounded in, which has different architecture and objects in that can help the player.

The world features a medieval aesthetic to it having wooden houses with straw roofs. There are flame barrels out in the world the helps people interact with them while in combat to help the play but to also open up new opportunities to the player, these barrels are recognizable by their noticeable bright red colour. These will entice the play to use them because of the massive amount of damage they do, making it very beneficial for the player.

NPC’s (Non-Playable characters) & characters

NPC’s are Non Playable Characters that offer different things, like being an enemy or a ally that offers quests.

NPC’s in the game will offer side quests and have their own stories which will help engage the player in the game. There will be a wide variety of NPC’s that are vastly different from each other. From knights to peasants they will all having different tasks and stories. There will also be characters in the same clan as you that will relate to the player character as they have the same goal.

Feedback interface

Feedback Interface is the HUD (heads up display) that shows things like a mini-map and health.

The game has a mini-map that helps the player navigate through the world, and also has a health and mana bar at the top left of the screen. Below the health bar shows all buffs & debuffs the character has, having a timer showing them how long they have left on them. Also, there is an experience bar that will be below the mana bar. and experience or gold earned will show up on the screen notifying you about them.

 

 

 

Game menu

I made a main menu for my game in Photoshop. For the design i wanted it to be mysterious, using a dark sky to convey the feeling on isolation and danger.

I started off by using this background image.

I then used this picture of a moon over the original images moon to hide the stretch.

I then added the text.

This is the finished image.

Overall i am happy with the design. Although it’s simplistic i feel it conveys the feeling of being in danger.

I liked designing the menu with a classic flash game vibe to it.

Games I have made

This is the first one I made. It is very simple as I didn’t know how to do it properly. The level just uses physics to get the ball to the bottom and has to get past all the circles.

This is the second one i made. It is a bit more complex than the first one but is still simplistic. It is the same as the first level, but there is shapes differing in size making it a bit harder for the ball to reach the bottom.

This is the third one i made. The shapes are a lot more advanced and the level is overall more advanced. It takes a lot longer for the ball to reach the bottom because of all the obstacles.

This is the fourth one i made. This level is very advanced, it now has control support and has a moving goal. When the ball collides with the circles the circles disappear and the ball bounces off. The objective is to get 10 balls in the goal to then finish the level. 

This is the last one i made. The idea for the game was to go with something quirky and comical. I really enjoyed making this because I just had fun doing it and I didn’t have to think too seriously about it. It has a moving goal and features clouds and rubbish acting as obstacles that stop the balls. There is a limited amount of balls you can drop and if you use them all without scoring enough you fail. There is control support, using the arrow keys to move left and right and left clicking to drop balls. On an Xbox controller using the analog sticks to move left and right and pressing ‘a’ to drop balls. On a PlayStation controller, use the analog stick to move left and right and press ‘x’ to drop balls.

 

Feedback Reflection

When i got my feedback the criticism i got helped me understand how to pace my game properly, For example i got criticism on the size of the stuff i made. The amount i wanted in my game was unrealistic for the time frame i had to make the game. On a bigger size game it would be good to have that amount of depth but in a small one like mine it is unneeded. I also got praised for the good character depth and the enemies, these accompanied by the vast array of powers will make the game unique, using different powers in different situations helps the game be more unique.

Maya Animation

I animated this in Maya, it is a body rig.

I will be showing each frame in an animation then showing a gif of the whole thing together. This is image 1

This is image 2

This is image 3

Image 4

Image 5

Image 6

Image 7

Image 8

Image 9

Overall I enjoyed animating this because it was something new and had a steep learning curve, it became a lot easier after doing it more.

I Liked animating the poses the most, I thought it was interesting to slowly set poses and seeing the animation come to life.

What i didn’t like about this was how repetitive it was, constantly pressing the key frame button.

The thing i would change about this is make the animation smoother.

I don’t think this belongs in a game because it is not smooth enough, if i add more frames and make the animation more complex and smooth it could belong in a game.

If it was to go in a game it would probably go into a comedy game, the animation is very comical and satire. I would use the animation as a victory or when the player unlocks an award.