Opening Words
This week has been rought by polarising topics and difficult decisions. I've come to realize that what makes a FPS game good is very subjective. More on the design later.
This week has also been a week of research, primarily on the topic of Unreal Engine 4. Learning the engine while trying to make a game in 9 weeks feels daunting, but we're starting to see results now. The stress of exploring the engine while also being undecided on specifics of mechanics has been tense, so we're trying our best to focus on specifying instead of changing much more in the general design now.
The Design
Week two has come and gone. Our design goal of finishing the game design document has not quite been reached. We're closer, but there's still a bunch of things to finilize. The design process has been slowed down by the fact that the team has very different opinions of what makes a good FPS game. I've accepted this however, because it's very important that everyone feels like they're working on a game that they enjoy working on. So we've redesigned a bit, and sacrificed our goal of finishing the GDD until today by doing so.
What we have left to specify in the GDD:
State all the enemy behaviours we wish for, prioritize them, state what variables affect them, design when they are allowed to attack, how accurate are they, specify what is MVP(minimum viable product)
Exactly what happens when the player interacts with a upgradestation, how does the upgrade UI look, and how does the player interact with it?
How health and regeneration works
Finilize damage types(kinetik, fire, electric for example) and what happens when you combine two of them
Finilize other types of modifications to the gun. Projectile, trajectory, ammo size, rate of fire, etc.
Current Concept
FPS Wave survival
Single player
Toy room setting
Extremely gun-centric
Survive for as long as you can in an endless wave survival game. Between rounds the player can run to an upgrade station where when interacted with, the player can upgrade/customize their weapon. The weapon at round one is a standard assault rifle with 3 damage type slots and 4 misc weapon mod slots. After each round you can get one mod to put on your gun, altering the way it shoots.
The misc mod slots can affect the type of projectile you shoot, rate of fire & trajectory, the damage type mods affects damage type, allowing you to shoot kinetik, fire, electric or poison rockets for example. The player can also combine two damage types at the same time, creating a new damage type.
The weapon so far is based on games like Magica and Loadout.
The target audience for the game are glorious action-nuts that laughs at destruction.
When the player finally dies as a reward for building such an awesome weapon, they're to be presented with the 3D model of their final weapon as well as their statistics for that specific session.
The plans for the near future
Finish the GDD by completing the aforementioned list of mechanics. Start the level design process alongside with the art concepting phase to ensure a design that tightly ties together with the art.
This friday is the larger alpha presentation. For that milestone we want to have started the whiteboxing of the level, maybe even with some early version of props in the game. We'll see if we can hold up to that goal however, due to the prolonged initial phase of figuring out the base concept. That's going to be it for today folks! See you space cowboy...