Week 7: Physics

PDF Download: Newsletter: Week 7Picture11

We started our brainstorming session Monday morning with individual presentations: each  Picture12team member worked over the weekend to come up with at least 3 ideas as fleshed out as possible to present to the team. The idea was to get people thinking creatively individually to such a level that they could explain their ideas concisely. This was an attempt to overcome our brainstorming problems of last cycle, where ideas were never really understood until very late in the cycle.

The rest of Monday was spent debriefing about the last cycle and planning our attack for cycle 3. On Tuesday we regrouped to talk about our ideas and pare them down as much as possible. Finally, Wednesday we had 3 solid ideas that we felt had promise, and we prepared 1-sheets for each to present to the clients.

Those 3 ideas were:Picture15

  1. BumpBlasters: An arena based combat game where players can only move by shooting.   Picture14 Picture13 Each player controls a ship with a cannon in its tail, but cannon balls do not hurt other players. You can only hurt players by stabbing them with the spike in your nose or pushing them into walls.
  2. Cube: A physics puzzle platformer. You must traverse an open space filled with floating cubes to reach a goal. The player can jump from cube to cube, and can attract or repel cubes with magnetic powers. Cubes have their own properties and are affected by the player in different ways.
  3. Neutron: A tower climbing platformer, except you can’t control your character directly. Instead you must use a magnet that encircles the screen to push or pull your character around the level. Avoid spikes in the walls and falling off the bottom of the screen in order to reach to top of the tower.

After these three ideas were sent to the client, we had a short meeting on Thursday to discuss them. After some advice from the client, the team decided to move forward with BumpBlasters as it is very simple at its core and has a lot of Picture16 Picture17 Picture18potential for growth and development. With this idea in hand, we spent the rest of Thursday and Friday planning features and beginning prototyping. Some of our features will include:

  1. Multiple battle arenas
  2. Power-ups
  3. Obstacles like boxes and mines
  4. Multiple game modes (Stock, Timed, etc)
  5. Possible single-player mode
  6. Customizable player ships
  7. …and more!

In addition to gameplay ideas, we’ve also begun concepting possible themes and art styles for the game. We’ve decided to stick with 2D art for a change of pace, and we’re sticking to three possible themes: Space, Abstract, and Forest. Sahana and Rex are hard at work producing example art and we’ll review what we have on Monday to choose the final direction we’ll take the art in. We plan to have a playable prototype by the end of today, and Monday we’ll be delivering final design documentation and concept art. We’re off to a good start and we’re excited to see what we can make of this cycle! Thanks for reading!

– Team PlayStation Ignite