Week 3: Game Design Document

Hey all!

Update: you can find the Game Design Document and week 3 builds in this google drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Dph7e_ozjhTejF91xARke2T6xKV5iGx3?usp=sha...

This week our main progress has been made through our game design document. In this document (that you can download on the main page), we outline the key components to our game. Specifically, we run through the overview, mechanics, controls, assets, level design, and timeline of our project.

The goal of our game hasn't changed since last week, we want an action game where your controls have different personalities, and you have to leverage them to complete the levels. We have ironed out what our remaining abilities are, and we have concluded that the following abilities would be fun in our game.

Our W(upwards) ability is a cone based attack, a simple ability for killing generic enemies. We decided to make attacking an ability to make it more thoughtful, instead of holding down the attack button, the player should time their attacks in order to deal with multiple enemies. The S(downwards) ability we landed on is a mine. The player sets up a mine that takes a bit of time to activate, detonating on contact of an enemy. This mechanic encourages the player to play with more planning when facing certain enemies that cannot be killed with the upwards attack. In addition, mines deactivate after a certain amount of time so the player doesn't spam the ability too much.

Our A(left) ability is a dodge roll, in either horizontal direction. We decided that it wouldn't be as fun to limit the ability to only rolling left, so for now we're sticking to horizontal axis rolling. The dodge roll gives the player invincibility during the duration, allowing the player to dodge projectiles. The D(right) ability is an AOE knockback to surrounding enemies. We figured this would be a useful ability to have in sticky situations, and can be a solution to enemies that cannot be destroyed by the up or down abilities (this move currently does not do damage).

In terms of code updates, we did a bit of tweaking to fix enemy flying bugs (not intended), and one of our devs implemented a proper UI for the meters. We also have controller support for our upwards ability.

In regards to some other things, looking back on this week we didn't really have many meetings to discuss what we wanted to iron out as a team together, so maybe this is something we can try to improve on as a team. In addition, it would be better to have a list of tasks at the start of each week so every team member knows what they're responsible for for the week. Since we had to include a project timeline in our design document, this might help jumpstart the process. This also includes having concrete tasks for our art team and music team to have, as the dev team has not done a great job assigning them concrete tasks thus far.

Overall, we hope to get some insightful feedback on our design document. We're looking to begin implementing the other mechanics into our game, to be able to show our concept is fun.

Till next week!