GDD Week 10

This week there isn't a lot for me to write about because all we have been doing is finishing up the GDD & with the hand in to be next week it is a good stage for us to be at. It means that while we finish up the design document we can focus more on the pitch. The pitch I haven't really spoke about before but I will be talking about it a lot more in the coming weeks.

Basically we have to pitch our game to publishers for 15 minutes with a presentation & be able to answer any questions that we can on the game. Luckily for I have no problem with public speaking so that shouldn't be much of a problem as well as having worked on the game relentlessly for the last 10 weeks I'm extremely confident that our group knows all there is to know about the game.

I have just finished up a few sections in the design document & there is of writing this only a couple to do & one or two to finish to a more complete state. I think that over the last 10 weeks our group has shown the commitment & dedication that a real design team would have shown to the task at hand. Anyway we have chosen to go with the Flat Red Ball Game Engine as it gives us all the features that we need & it makes them very easy to use. I will not go into great detail here but I will link the feature list for the engine in case anyone is interested.

http://www.flatredball.com/frb/docs/index.php?title=FlatRedBall_Features

GDD Week 9

This blog has come a little later as I have had so much going on but none the less. This week I finished off all the skills & character bonuses which will be shown below in a complete table. The skills & level shown below will be the starting levels for each of the characters.

Game World - The Map

So I have been working on getting a map drawn up for our game so as people can see the layout of the world we so readily speak about in our previous blogs. I came up with a few different layouts & then decided on the one below.

I chose this layout as it had ample land mass as well as a lot of inland lakes & a couple of islands some of which I eventually removed as you will see in this next image.

I removed some of the islands & lakes as after looking at them they just didn't seem right to be there. So once I was happy with this I started to put in preliminary place names & locations as you will see in the next image.

This is what I have so far but it is subject to change & more places will be added in as they are finished.

Game Story

Today we decided to get the basis for the game story started.

The four people go into the pods & their respective timeline memories (with the exception of the scientist, who is in the pod for the process of carrying out live debugging and maintenance).

A virus released into Dreamscapes Somnium system by a free radical terrorist group has started to eat away at the memory cores in the system & takes them into its own being in such a way that the machine becomes self-aware in a sense.  As such the virus can change the memories in the system to bleed into each other causing the memories to either have aspects of more than one memory or jump between memories.

The inhabitants of the pod don’t realise at first that the machine is malfunctioning and by the time the scientist realises what’s going on, the virus has taking a firm hold of the machine and starting to cause major malfunctions within each of the individual members’ eras.

During the events of the malfunction the individuals are under the impression that they are on their way to exit the pod and get out of the machine – however due to the malfunction, the illusion of escape is diminished.

Together the four characters must work together to overcome the virus and escape the pods. They do this by completing the story lines that there memories have created for them. This means that they will have to use all their skills to overcome the obstacles set before them by the virus. The world shifts will happen when the virus has been harmed in some way it will shift the world to try to make the players weaker & therefore easily defeated.  The scientist has his own agenda though and wants to isolate the virus and study it.

Towards the end, there is a “zone shift” into Somnium. The characters wake up in their respective “virtual” homes, believing that the previous events were just a figment of their imagination, they start to realise, through subtle changes in the world, then the presence of beings that do not belong in the material world, that they are back within Somnium, as they venture towards the dreamscape building in hopes to solve the problem. As they get closer to the building the virus becomes more aggressive, they remember their previous battles and realise that they still have the skills and head out to take on the virus.

/*The scientist has the ability to fight the virus through his upgraded debugging pod but has to complete tasks to gain access to this feature; his particular missions will entail some maintenance aspects within the world. This will enhance skills such as security and slicing as the character progresses enabling him to access more complex security terminals and programs.*/

Multiplayer

We had initially decided that we would have all players on the one server in parties of four with all the different era's loaded in & have the world change events happen during quests. That way you could not just go to the era that you wanted to you had to wait for the event to happen. But we eventually decided against this as it would be to difficult to implement with the persistent world changes we could not guarantee that the world would be the same for everyone because of saves.

We then decided to go back to the original idea of just having a localised server & having a four player Co-Op which could be played locally or online. That way the persistent world changes could be managed a lot easier, players would be able to take in their single player characters with all the skills & items they have unlocked but as such the difficulty of the multi-player will increase significantly. The level of the enemies will be taken from the average level of the amount of players playing so as to always have a balanced but challenging game.

There will be more quests in multi-player that aren't there in the single player game, there will also be extra enemies in the multi-player these will be discussed in detail at a later date

I will divulge more details of the multi-player aspects of our game as soon as we finalize all the details