Week 2 (09/07/2015 – 09/13/2015)
During this week, our main goal is to brainstorm ideas regarding the information we collected from client last week.
We totally came up with three raw ideas:
Concept 1 – World of Wizards
Mechanic:
Multiplayer online RPG
The background is a Magic school.
Every player is a wizard who has their own specific skill. They need to learn and practice their skills at the beginning of the game. After the training part, four players form a team. They need to fight against the monsters/enemies as a group.
Every player takes their training class on their own controller(tablet). The training program is very simple and brief. Each one of them will learn one of the four skills list below. After the training program, they will have missions to fight with the enemies. The battlefield is on the big TV screen and all of them will share the same information.
Skills:
- Wand: cast magic spells
- Cauldron: make poison or medicine
- Broomstick: fly and use the broomstick to attack
- Magical Harp: use rhythm to attack
Cooperation:
- The one who has a broomstick will be very close to the enemy, because this player can just use broomstick to attack the enemy. In addition, this player can be the trick, for example, drawing enemy’s attention and let other teammates to attack the enemy.
- The player who has the cauldron can poison the enemy and make the medicine to heal the teammates.
- The harp guy and the wand guy can work together to create a spell with rhythm. This will be more powerful than their own attack.
Platform: tablets, TV screen
Reference: World of Warcraft, Harry Potter
Concept 2 – Spaceship Exploration
Mechanic: Each student is assigned to a role in a spaceship: captain, radar detector, gunner and pilot.
Each player has their own ipad. Commands will show and operations will be done on ipads. They need to share the information to teammates. On the TV, there will be a global camera showing the whole battlefield.
captain: receive everyone’s messages, make the decision and give commands to other roles.
radar detector: know the type, distance, amount and all type of information of enemies.
gunner: choose different types of guns, calibrate, and fire.
pilot: control the speed and direction of the spaceship. Also responsible for fuel detection.
Concept 3 – Collaborative Tower Defense
Mechanic: Each student is assigned to manage a part of the map and one type of power towers. All the zone on the map is connected through routes. Monsters appear at the beginning of the route and move from zone A to zone Z. The whole map shows on the large TV. Each student can build towers at their zone, on their own iPhone/iPad.
Level up design:
- Several routes exists, player can use wall to block some route.
- Monsters can show up at spots.
- Towers can help other zones.
- Each zone can choose their own power towers.
Tower: Speed, critical strike, poison, slow, mana sucker, dizzy… up to 9 power.
Magic power: affect the whole map.
After brainstorming, we did analyze pros and cons of each design:
| Concept 1 | Concept 2 | Concept 3 | |
| Pros | Attract the young players.
Easy to choose difficulty and level. |
Need a lot of communication and leadership.
Innovate mechanism. Easy to do the art. |
Easy to scale.
Relate to the strategy. Need communication. Save the art resource. |
| Cons | Lots of artwork, especially the 3D for each characters. | Hard to scale.
Long term engagement. |
Too strategy, need logical thinking.
|
On Friday, client confirmed with us that they preferred the Spaceship Exploration idea the most. In addition, we specifically pointed out that the violence level should be PG-13. We figured out that the reason they wanted the spaceship idea was because there was explicit communication and leadership element. However, in the second idea, each role has too strong dependency on each other, which might be a severe issue as development goes on. Therefore, we decided to combine the theme of spaceship and character design of the first idea together. By doing so, we can not only emphasize on cooperation and communication, but also overcome the difficulty of game design and development. So we came up with a initial version of game design document and were going to be prepared to present it to faculties and client.