Final Assignment Ideas for Kyna and Andy

So I have two prominent ideas for the final project, each of which are centered around their own central game mechanics.

Idea 1: Drawing game, temporarily called Poltergeist. The idea is that you are, well, a poltergeist, and within a certain range around you you have the ability to manipulate matter. How we actually implement the mechanic is something that will take some more experimentation, but here is a screenshot from an existing prototype from last year:

Yeah we would probably scrap the prototype and start over. For the final version I’d like to see as much drawing control as there is in something like crayon physics, but backup implementations could include dragging corners to create shapes or designing the environment such that you can only interact with certain objects.

Idea 2: Online multiplayer game. Here’s a screenshot from the hackathon that I participated in last weekend:

The back-end for this game is almost done, and allows any number of players to connect to the server, move around, and chat. The front end is currently a top-down game, building toward a multiplayer action game, but could fairly easily be changed to a different idea. I’ve put about 20 hours of work into this, but most of that was on the back end so I don’t have a solid pitch for today. I probably want to build on this in or outside of class though.

5 comments
  1. For idea 1: I like the drawing idea, but I’m unsure how easy that is to program. Also I feel like its missing a main focus or something to tie the gameplay ideas and the world.

    Idea 2: This definitely needs more fleshing out. You were mentioning combining the two ideas which could make it interesting.

  2. I personally like the first idea better but I agree with what people said, it needs to be tweaked a little bit to make more sense. I think the gameplay has a lot of potential though.

  3. I think your first idea, if fleshed out a bit more, could be really cool. I like the idea of you acting as a poltergeist that helps the main guy along by drawing in platforms or scaring the guy to jump a certain way, or things like that. So you act as some mysterious invisible force in his life and get him to progress along the game (I’m not sure what the actual goal of the game would be). But I like the art and I think it looks interesting!

  4. I think the crayon design will look really cool for the first game. If you want to continue with this design, you could make it look incredibly childish – coloring outside the lines or coloring items sparingly, characters that are out of proportion etc. would be neat to see.

    hmm if you want the player to have the ability to build in the game world, it would be cool if you could do more than just drag/click. Maybe the player could construct items by typing them out

  5. The second idea doesn’t seem fleshed out enough and it would be cool if there was some other plot to it. I like that you’re delving into the world of server-side programming / MMO stuff.

    The first idea needs to be re-art-ed. For real. I think it could be interesting, but like people said in class, the poltergeist aspect needs to be expanded upon or removed.

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