DESMA 157B

As I explained in my previous post, I struggled quite a bit over the past weekend to fix my broken core mechanic. Yet after a lot of research and after experimenting with a couple of different ideas, I suddenly had the inspiration that I needed! I think I now have a good solid game design that is consistent with my original plan, and feels engaging and fun. I will demonstrate my new design with a little storyboard:

Sorry for the crappy drawings, but I put this thing together very quickly. The idea is that Frog Masters can influence the behavior of the frogs by throwing some “magic pills”. After the Frog Master slecects and throws a magic pill in the arena, his frog will fetch the pill, eat it and acquire the behavior associated with the pill. There are going to be several kinds of pills that the player can use and each one will trigger a different behavior that can be offensive, defensive, or neutral. Another game element is the fact that there is a fence that divides the arena in two parts. Let me illustarte this with an example.

Let’s say we have the followingpill types in the game

• Pepper pill: Puts the frogs in a state ready to perform a fiery offensive move
• Trigger pill: triggers the active frog behavior (e.g. perform the fiery move)
• Food pill: the frog fetches this pill and gains some extra life
• Kick Pill: The frog will perform a ninja kick as soon as he eats the pill

Then a game scenario would be like this:

1. Player one selects the pepper pill and throws it on the other side of the fence. His frog will jump over the fence and eat the pill entering the “pepper behavior”
2. Player two selects the food pill and throws it on his own side of the fence. His frog eats the pill and gains some extra life.
3. Player one throws the trigger pill on the other side of to his frog and his frog engages in a fiery move against the other player that gets some damage
4. Player two throws a kick pill to his own frog that immediately kicks the other for some damage.

Gameplay elements

The core mechanics has a lot in common with the Worms series of games

• The game has a strategic element to it
• Since players have to throw the pills, there is a chance that the may not throw it were they want. This adds to the challenge and makes multiplayer games more fun and outcomes less predictable
• Since the frogs are physics based, one frog may actually throw the other somewhere else in the arena after a move (e.g. with a kick) and distrupt the other player’s strategy.

Accomplishments

• This game design resuses all the assets and code I developed so far.
• I discussed this design and showed my prototype to a couple of people (who used to enjoy playing Worms with me) and they think is fun.
• I f I manage to implement a couple more things for my game by the end of the week I am pretty much back on schedule!