Week 7

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Phase 4

Campsite Tycoon Prototype

During reading week, I managed to create an animation prototype showing how the mechanics for designating areas for building in the Campsite Tycoon game idea. I created this in Blender using simple placeholder artwork and some created to afford the assets required.

Players should get to move around the forest they own, designate areas for development which will be built by the AI, not the player. This allows the player to focus on the bigger picture of the campsite while providing downtime to play with the mini-games, represented by the archery range and fishing lake. So players can be involved in the site they are developing. Similar to how Planet Coaster allows players to ride the roller coasters. The campsites might work as the facilities that draw customers into the area, while the activities produce an income. This would then create a simple currency balancing system for the players to play with.

To Help Sound Design

Something I have come across this week has been the company Sonniss and their annual GDC free download for sound effects to use royalty-free. This will be incredibly useful for the second semester when development starts and as I had told the team I would love to try and take a handle on the sound design for the project, this will be very useful. I may still need to create my own foley recordings and I would like to try this, but because time will be tight, something like this package is perfect for our team. Seeing as this is such a powerful free tool, I have shared this with the rest of the course as I hope it will greatly improve their projects too.

Beaver Game Idea

'Beaver Game' is an idea purely based on using the beaver as a core character to the game. Playing as a beaver in the forest, building and maintaining dams while focusing on a meaningful story. The story focused on highlighting the damage of the logging industry and how important the beaver actually is to the natural habitat of the boreal forest. I also found the structures the beaver builds interesting and could probably make so interesting level and puzzle designing [See Sketchbook 1, pages 7,8]. This idea wasn't continued because the team didn't feel inspired by it and that it had nothing new or unique in terms of gameplay which I agree with.

Wolf Pack Prototype

Working on this prototype with Jamie to figure out how the combat in the Wolf Pack idea might work. Jamie felt that a turn-based style system would afford for the best outcome considering the player would need to control multiple wolves in one go. Considering his research told us that wolves only hunt in packs, we needed to come up with a method that would allow the Deer to roam and graze freely while always able to notice the player's approach to the Deer.

We found that the hex board allowed for greater movement which made for a more interesting way to approach the Deer while sneaking. If the Deer noticed that it was being hunted, we had it run in the most opposite direction to the wolf it had noticed with a set amount of movement. This I felt would have to be developed further based on more research but it had good feet to stand on.

1st Iteration

Testing the random movement of the (Red) 'Ai' Deer with a d8 to randomly chose a square around the position of the Deer's location. This would produce a new location to walk to while it is grazing each turn. In the mean time, Jamie was controlling the pack of wolves movement each turn. The Deer would also make a perception roll with a d20 each tern to determine whether it can successfully detect a wolf within a radius. I suggested that the detection check should increase in difficulty as the radius increases for the Deer. The first ring around it only required a roll of 2+ with the d20, the 3rd ring of squares required a roll of 10+, the forth ring being 15+ and so on. This provides the player with a risk and reward element.
I also felt it should replicate the direction of with the Deer is facing and how its line of sight would affect the outcome of the perception check. Which is what the N/E/S/W compass is used for.

2nd Iteration

We decided to use the core fundimentals of the first iteration but give the player's wolf pack greater flexibility in movement. This meant changing the dice used for the 'Ai' Deer but the principles still worked the same. In this version I also suggested to add in wind factor into the system. So if one of the wolves were up wind of the Deer, this would add a multiplyer to the Deer's perception dice check.

Week 7 Reflection

Week 8