Mancakes G3 Design
Team Members: Livingled, Patches, Stonewall
Title of the Game: Bearbrella
Detailed plan for the game
Our avatar is falling forever alongside a building. The player uses an umbrella to slow his fall and have better control of movement. Every moment the player uses this umbrella a bar on the HUD drains by a set rate. If you use the whole bar the umbrella breaks and is unusable for a set cooldown time. The umbrella usage bar recharges at a set rate whenever you are not using it.
Target Feature Sets:
Low-bar: We want to have achieved a crudely made avatar who can fall through the space with the ability to temporarily slow his fall and dodge simple obstacles to reach a goal.
Mid-bar: We want to have achieved procedural generation of obstacles to create an infinite level, implemented a score system to keep track of how far the player travelled, and a greater variety of obstacles to test the player’s mastery of the game feel. We want a decent level of polish – decent art and obstacles that fit the game world.
High-bar: We want to add some of our “cool idea” ambitions: an upgrade shop to create incentive to continue playing, additional polish effects in terms of sound, animation and particle effects, as well as, possibly, implementing Xbox controller support!
Weekly Goals
Week 1 (11/5 to 11/12): We want to have implemented basic avatar mechanics (ability to slow the fall, left/right movement to dodge) and decide upon how we are going to deal with falling, in general. Our current approach is to have the avatar actually fixed into a bounded box of movement whilst the level itself scrolls up.
Week 2 (11/12 to 11/19): To prepare for the playtesting, we certainly want to have implemented a static game level with some interesting obstacles. The game feel element of the avatar should be polished and fun to manipulate. The obstacles need not be in their final form, by any means, but enough to communicate the feel for feedback.
Week 3 (11/19 to 11/26): During this week, we’ll work with the feedback given during the alpha playtesting and fix any glaring issues or balance problems. We will also begin developing the procedural generation of obstacles and implementing a score mechanic.
Week 4 (11/26 to 12/3): To prepare for our final demo, we will need to evaluate our progress – if we’ve achieved most of our mid-bar goals, we can work on implementing the item shop mentioned for our high-bar. In the case that mid-bar requirements are not yet met, we will round them out: Procedural level generation and acceptable polish/animations for both our avatar and the obstacles the avatar faces should be complete.
By Alpha we want low-bar implemented. That is because low-bar functionality is the core of the game is in low-bar. If that part of the game sucks, then the game will never NOT suck. Further, if we had to “bail” on medium bar, we could develop our low-bar into a full game with proper polish. Static levels wouldn’t be so bad.
By Final Playtesting we want medium-bar implemented. The reason we want this implemented is that this is the core feature set of the game plus a little more to give it a nice polished sheen. The idea being we could, then, turn this into a better game at a later date.
Here is the link to our design document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V4qkIH9cVack4C-2R8CDn37nFv4ZIMDQt_8sTJuJxyE/edit?usp=sharing
Here is the link to a set of slides were we to have a second presentation (I was under the false impression we would have another one):
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zgjbHfws3O1Eni1AwW49zCdEZyTZF8IBp8f4QwbjCG8/edit?usp=sharing
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