Eggs With Legs Sprint 2 & 3 Reflection
We have been working together for a couple of more weeks now, and it’s going really well. We have three game concepts that I’m extremely excited for now, and I think that’s due to how much discussion we’ve had about each one. We’ve spent hours in discussion over even smaller aspects of the games, and I think this has really benefited the team. While it does eat up a lot of our time, it has allowed us to all share a unified vision of what we want to make, and it also helps ensure that these concepts are as good as they can possibly be. I’m having a very difficult time figuring out which of the three I want to spend the rest of the semester on, just because they’re all so unique, and such cool concepts. I expect to figure out which one we will go with over the next week or two as the other prototypes are finished.
Our first prototype, which we just finished, is for Junkpunk, our battle-bots inspired robot building/fighting/selling game. Looking at it from an outside perspective, i think the idea of this game would really appeal to a lot of people. Getting to build your own robot to fight with is just a really cool concept, which has been attempted in other games before, but I think that we will be bringing something new to it. First of all, we’re going with a really colorful punk aesthetic, which I think will really suit the game and bring something completely new to the genre. Next, I think that the game loop of selling your robots to make money to upgrade your shop, which will let you buy new parts for your robot, and earn money in fights to put back into your shop and so on will help keep the gameplay interesting, rather than it just be building and fighting all the time. I think that there is already a pretty good market for people who would like this game, given how popular other robot-building games have been in the past, for example Robocraft. Although I think that our simpler modular system will help make it more accessible, since you won’t have to spend far too long trying to build a robot, which will let you get back into the game much more quickly.
Our next game is our rougelike/rougelite game, where we have the player in control of a book of demons and has to fight the armies of Heaven because he just wants to keep it. I think that it’s going to be really cool to work on, since we can pretty easily make a smaller vertical slice of the game, and then just add more to it if/when we have the time to. We’re going to be starting work on a prototype for the combat for it this week, and I’m excited to see how it turns out. We have a pretty unique idea for how combat is going to work for it, especially for a rougelike. We plan to have a grid-based combat system, with some old school RPG mechanics for characters. The characters would be locked into a ring around the edges, with all of the enemies in the middle. One of the core ideas of the game is that a lot of the attacks would have knockback on them, which will allow you to bounce the enemies around between your units to build up combos on them. I think a lot of people would be interested in this sort of game, since there’s been a lot of hype for other rougelikes recently. I also know that there is a large community of people who play slower strategy based rouglelikes such as Slay the Spire or Monster Train (even if those are both deckbuilding games and ours isn’t). I think a lot of people would enjoy this game, and I know I would, so it’s really exciting for me too.
The final prototype/game we’re working on is Time Thief, which is our 4D platforming (get it? since it’s a 3D platformer and we’re also dealing with time , which is sometimes called the fourth dimension) metroidvainia time manipulation game. I think that a ton of people would be interested in this based on it’s concept alone. Not many games have messed with time manipulation, and even fewer have had it as their main mechanic. I know its always been a concept I’ve wanted to play with, so I’m super excited to be working on it. I’ve actually been working on making it in Unreal for our prototype, so Jake (our programmer) doesn’t have to spend all his time making all three prototypes. Learning Unreal for it has been… a process… so far, but I’m getting the hang of it now, which is nice. Back to what people would think of our game, I think that the decision to make it a metroidvania is a really good one, as well. I’m super excited to be able to work on the level design for a metroidvania, since it just seems like such a cool way of designing a map and teaching the player how to play. This I think will help people enjoy our game a bit more, since it will help them learn the game at their own pace, and will allow the learning process for the game to be much more spread out and continue through the entire game. I’m really excited to work with the team later tonight on fleshing out the mechanics of the game a little more, as well.