We began fleshing out a concept which would be built using the Unreal Development Engine which was based around the already-functioning vehicle mechanics (which would save us time developing our own code..) but this soon fell flat on its face when we considered both the scale of the project we had just concocted and the fact we'd restricted our imagination to the capacity of the game engines car mechanics.
We began going down the line of developing a game we would all enjoy playing, that didn't have to require an all dancing prototype to test the specific game mechanics and overall gameplay.
My main role within this project was the development of the level design, and producing a visual prototype of the map which could be played by the group.
The game was constructed within Adobe Photoshop as opposed to paper as it was much quicker at mocking up an effective, accurate representation of the playing space. At the heart of the game, it is basically cat chases mouse; everyone is a cat and everyone is a mouse. This in itself creates an enjoyable ever-changing main gameplay loop.
We considered what kind of environment would both work well for environmental game play and also relate to the actual context of the game, we decided on a prison: locked in to the confines of an almost self supporting world, with the prison cells and the prison warden playing a major part in terms of the actual game play itself.
Here is a list of the game mechanics we have implemented :
- There would be a set number of players playing as convicts and only ever one player playing as the warden. This player would guard the more powerful loot as well as act as a moderator, whose duties would include sorting out who's after who and the dice rolling for picking up weapons, damage and items.
- Players roll at the start of each round to determine who goes first in that round, which brought a whole new element to the game which is great.
- Players must stay within a specific area for a whole turn in order to be able to pick up an item or a weapon from that area.
- After 5 turns of the game the dinner bell is rang and all convicts are summoned to the dining hall, where they may try to get the chance to kill one another.
- After a convict kills another convict, all players' targets and hunters are reshuffled, additionally, if a player kills another player within sight of a security camera, said player must then wait 3 turns in the cell before he may continue play.
After multiple play throughs of the game we had realised what problems had come from our initial theory, its strange how much comes apparent when you actually begin to play a game for the first time.
This is the map I created on Adobe Photoshop, we could play through this by having each player on a separate layer and conforming the the grid snapping to move each character one whole tile at a time.
We revised multiple elements of the game, starting with the actual layout of the level. It had become painfully obvious the map was heavily orientated the right hand side of the board; this in itself caused a lack of variety in terms of game play (picking cards from the same couple of rooms) and the cat and mouse element of the game ended up turning in to a simple pile on with no specific game tactics.
I re-structured the level to accommodate a more even distribution of the rooms dependent on their importance and spread from the main cell block. I could also after seeing how the first map played out, redesign the actual cell room so that players might spawn at a 'better' location than player B, giving them quicker access to the Gym or Infirmary.
It also became very apparent (to my miss-fortune, on three occasions) the wardens office was extremely hard to get in to; making the rewards seem unjustifiable for the risk. We reassessed this, allowing a single dice role against the Warden to decide if a player would either receive the shotgun and access keys (to the red corridors) or simply be sent to their cell for the next 3 turns (allowing their attacker to make a quick ambush to their cell!).
One of the other main points that came through was the distance at which players were moving, it felt that 5 spaces per turn was a little too slow for the scale of the map. I was expecting this to be changed as we only really guesstimated it before even playing our first game, we have now upped this to 8 tiles per move which has made the game play more exciting.
Here is the revised map, made a little more visually exciting as it was our final prototype for this game.
The game after its second revision turned out to be really enjoyable to play. We easily played over three hours of game play in a single day, the combination of kill, chase, risk and luck worked really well with both the dice and turn based rule. We found that making certain parts of the game random added more to it than having predefined pickups, it changed the game from what being almost classed as a FPS deathmatch (in a digital version) to a well controlled, tense, strategy based game.
I think most importantly, through this process and with such a tight deadline it was important to not be precious with our first idea. Your first idea is not necessarily your best and it is worth exploring other avenues before focusing all attention to a single idea.