Kilan Larsen
470 Blog Post 1
The game that my team of 4 will be building throughout the semester is called "Night Watch", a top-down strategy game about setting up security in a building (cameras, lasers, guards, etc.), and then using that security system to find and catch thieves throughout the night.
We divided up our team into the roles:
Kilan Sky Larsen - Designer/Programmer
Tyler Huff - Producer/Level Designer
Trevor Davis - Programmer
Alex Celeste - 3D Modeler
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To begin work on this project, I set out to create a thorough Game Design Document and an Asset List for the game.
The game design document is organized within a google doc that is accessible to all members of the team. This allows any team member to quickly look up information about the systems they will be creating for the game, rather than having to ask the designer (me) or the producer. The document totals 26 pages as of writing this, and will be updated as significant changes are made throughout development.
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Once the GDD was completed, I went through it and converted the individual parts into an asset list, shown below:
The next task that I was assigned was to create the rules for a paper prototype of the game so that we could quickly test out the core mechanics of the game. I was able to utilize my dry-erase D&D grid to draw a building layout and then made some representations of cameras, lasers, guards, thieves, and vision cones. From there, it was easy to test the prototype and find some flaws. One problem that I encountered was that setup of the security systems was taking too long, and operating it was too complex, so I removed the mechanic for the CCTV Network and increased the price of the cameras to simplify and balance things. I also aimed to make thief movement as intuitive and straightforward as possible, so that thieves were both either to move around and predict for the player.
Now that the pre-production work is out of the way, I will be spending the majority of my time in future sprints working on programming tasks so that we can have a vertical slice of the game's core mechanics for the first electronic prototype. Some of the tasks that I will be working on include:
- Selecting security measures (cameras, lasers, guards) from a UI panel
- Placing security measures on walls or floors
- Purchasing with money
- Fog of war
- CCTV cameras and guard vision cones through the fog of war
- Triggering lasers on contact
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That's all for now, I look forward to showing off the first electronic prototype for Sprint 2!