Planning the next prototype

Now I am planning the next prototype. So the feature I am want to implement to the next prototype are scoring system, enemy formations, level progression, enemies ability to attack on player anti-air gun and bonus targets that will travel sideways on the screen. Bonus targets are harmless to player, but if player shoots them he gets bonus score as a reward.

I will also start to plan a system that progressively increases the difficulty of the game as the time goes by. Meaning that at  the begining there will be less enemies, but towards the end of the level there starts to be a swarm of enemies incoming. Since I only have few different enemy types the next prototype will contain only one level and the game ends after the level is complete.

So to summarize what is required for the next prototype. One level with atleast two different enemy types. Bonus targets that provide score boost if destroyed. Enemies may appear in different formations and there needs to be atleast five different formations to choose form. Progressive difficulty so that the game gets harder towards the end of the level. Scoring system to that provides score based on players performance. Finally agressive enemies, so that player needs to look after his anti-air gun.

Also the screen orientation and aspect ration must be mobile device friendly. Currently it's 1:1.

I will not release the next prototype until all features above are implemented into the game. So next time you see video about Donnerfaust, it will contain all mentioned features.

Donnerfaust idea list

As I told earlier I keep track of my ideas for the game, so I thought that I could as well release he current list here, just to show what I am talking about. Here are the current ideas that I have listed for Donnerfaust. Please notice that the list is not in prioritized order.

• Scoring system. System to give player scores based on performance. Combo bonus, multikill bonus, etc.
• Highscore list. List to keep track on highscores.
• Level progression. Game will be easier at first, but gets harder as time goes by. Different enemies, etc.
• Different unlockable AA-guns. Guns with different damage level, loading time, blast radius, and bullet speed etc.
• Special weapons. Special weapons that has limited ammunition.
• Friendly AA-machinguns. In tight situations, player could call for AA-machinegun vehicles to give additional fire support.
• Friendly radar. Player could set a radar unit that will inform player about incoming air crafts.
• Bonus targets. If player destroys these targets they could give player a bonus score or bonus abilities.
• Enemy formations. Enemy aircrafts would attack if different formations. Line, column, wedge, diamond, etc.
• Enemies can attack. Enemy can shoot player’s AA-gun, if it gets close enough. Adds more pressure to the game.
• Google play integration. Enables the online highscores and achievements.

Most of the ideas listed above will be included to the game, but some may get discarded if for some reason I don't find the suitable for the game.

Prototype 2 and a name for the game

I made second prototype which now is following the theme that I established earlier. Now there is an anti-air gun that is controlled by player. It shoots anti-air rounds towards the enemy planes that are incoming from top of the screen. There is not much changes to the game mechanics except that now there is visible bullet flying that explodes after it reaches the point where player clicked. I made two different enemy aircrafts; Fighter and Bomber. Fighter is faster, but can be destroyed by single round. It also does less damage to factories than bomber. Bomber is slower, but it takes two rounds to get destroyed.

The graphics are not yet final, but they are giving the direction. I will keep the graphics as simple as possible. Same goes to sounds. I don’t poses any kind of audio skills, so I have to look up how I will implement the sounds to my game.

Game windows aspect ratio is completely wrong. So I will fix that to the next prototype. If I will play this game with mobile devices, I want to use portrait orientation for display. This way I have more time to react on incoming enemies.

First sprites for enemy aircraft

There is one more thing. I made up a name for the game; Donnerfaust. So now on I will refer this game by calling it Donnerfaust.

Prototyping

Earlier I wrote how I keep a list of my ideas. When I have enough ideas that fit my game I start to plan my next prototype of the game. I will select few ideas that I am going to include to my prototype. After the ideas are selected I start to design them into features. Once features are implemented and tested, I have a new prototype ready for game testing. In this phase I try to see how well the ideas actually fit into game. I seek for flaws and think how I can improve the game more, if some idea does not work, I will remove it from the game. Each prototype must bring new features to the game and they must be playable. By playable I mean that the prototype does not contain any unfinished features that may cause bugs.

After the prototype is tested and accepted, I start the whole process from the beginning and select group of new ideas. I repeat this process until I ran out of ideas or when I am happy with the game. Ok, so I know that in real world it’s not possible to repeat this process as many times as I would like. There will be a time limit when the game must be ready. There is also a thing called budget which limits the amount of money that can fed to the game. So I better start to scope my game to certain limits, otherwise I will end up writing about this same game next summer.

Luckily this game is quite simple so it should not be too difficult to scope it on feature wise. I would like to set a time limit as well, but since I am doing this on hobby wise, I have very limited amount of time that I can spent in a week for this project and that time is very random.

Keeping track of an ideas

When I come up with an idea most important thing for me is to write it down with a brief description as soon as possible. I have noticed that it is very important to write down, draw or even use recorder to store the idea. Otherwise the idea may be long forgotten, because there will be many other ideas coming as well and human mind is poor on keeping track of a list of ideas. Actually any list, if I go to grocery without a list I can be quite sure that I will not remember all the things that I need to buy.

I have noticed that for me the best way to list ideas is to write them to a small notebook. This way you can quickly write the idea down and make even a simple drawing if necessary. However I don’t carry always a notebook with me so smart phone will do as well. The most important thing is to keep all the idea in same place. I have excel sheet on my computer that I collect all the ideas. It won’t help me if the ideas are scattered in different notebooks and smartphone. Especially if the notebook somehow ends up as a drawing paper for my children. Although they could end up on creating some interesting ideas as well.

I will keep a collection of ideas which then works as a sort of to-do list. Every once in a while I go through the list and try to prioritize the list and think what ideas I should use in my current game. Even if some ideas won’t fit in the current game I am developing I won’t discard them. They may become useful later on with other games.

Of course people have different ways to keep track of things, but for me listing them works for the best. I don’t need even to write the idea with detail, because somehow when I see the listed idea I usually immediately remember what it was about. Strange thing the human mind is…

Time to think of about the theme

So before I start to develop the game any further I want to figure out what is the theme for my game. When I have a clear theme set up as early as possible it will be easier to come up with new ideas that improve the game.

I first though that this could be some sort of artillery command game. However while playing around with my first prototype I noticed that I want to make objects to move towards bottom with different speeds. This will make the objects overlap when the faster object will pass the slower object. For me it feels very unnatural when land objects (soldiers, tanks, etc.) overlap this way, so I had to rethink the theme a little bit. Then I remembered that in most top-down shooters you are fighting against multiple enemy planes, which may travel across the display with different speeds. In these kind of games it does not feels so unnatural when the objects overlap. So I had the idea that maybe the theme could be an anti-air defense game.

So the game theme will be World War II themed air defense game. In this theme the story could be something like this; The Axis planes are attacking the Allied factories and your anti-air artillery is the only thing between them. If the enemy plane is able to get past the screen the player will lose health, which indicates the factory damage. If health reduces to zero the game ends as all the factories are destroyed and enemy has reached its goal.

First prototype

Here is a video of my first prototype to test the game play. As you can see it is still extremely simple. Targets are marked by clicking the mouse button, and after  0.75 seconds there will be an explosion. If the red square happens to be in the explosion radius it will be destroyed. There is one second delay after each shot before player can shoot again. This represents the loading time and prevents the player to spam the game area with too many explosions. If the squares manage to reach the bottom of the screen the health bar is reduced by 10 points. At the start there is 100 health, so if 10 squares reach the bottom the game is over. Score system is not yet implemented, but scoring should work so that the faster objects provide more score than the slower ones. I would also like to add some sort of combo system and bonus if you manage to get multiple objects with one shot.

As you can see the game is far far from ready. The game is unbalanced, missing a proper theme, no sounds, etc. So there is still lot of work to be done...

Recommended reading for new game designers

I have lately read two good books about game design. I would recommend them both for anyone who is new to the game design.

The first book that I would recommend to start with is Jess Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. This books covers very well the game design topic. The book also provides a so called lenses which are helpful for game designers. Basically the lenses are collections of questions that you can ask yourself to reflect your game design. You can get these lenses as an iOS or Android application, but without reading the book, you may miss the point behind them.

The second book that I recommend to read after the The Art of Game Design is Raph Koster’s A Theory of fun for game design. This book may not be as detailed and practical as the first one, but it has really good food for the thought. This book was really easy and light reading with nice colorful pictures. I would say this book was more fun to read, but I still recommend you to read the books in the same order I did.

However there are many books to the subject. If you know any other good books that you would recommend please do so on comments section.

Links to the books:

The art of game design: A book of lenses
A theory of fun for game design

The Idea

The game development starts with an idea and here is my first game idea that I am going to introduce in this blog. The very basic idea in this game is to prevent objects reaching the bottom of the screen. The objects will appear top of the screen and kind of “fall” downwards to bottom. Player must try to shoot the objects, but he must take the speed of the objects into account. Practically this means that when player touches somewhere in the screen an explosion will appear after a short delay. This idea just popped to my mind while I was playing Tetris with my Windows Phone.

This game could be some sort of artillery spotting game for example. Where player is playing a role of forwards observer and giving fire commands to artillery. Don’t know yet, but let’s see how game ends up. At this point I will want to leave the theme still open, since the idea is based solely on game mechanics. 

So my very first step is to build a very simple concept to test this idea in practice. After I have tried the game concept few times, I will think about what sort of theme I should use around the idea. 

Idea illustrated

Introduction

This is a blog about game development and games in general from perspective of an amateur game designer. I write about my game designs ideas and how I create small games. Sometimes I might also write about games that I find good or bad. The reason why I write this blog is to keep learning my game design skills. Writing a blog is also a great way to document your work and it is nice to look back and see how I have done things. Hopefully I also get some constructive feedback on my ideas and thoughts. 

I have studied digital media in university which involved courses about game development. I have also read some literature about the subject, so I have gained understanding on what game development means and requires. I have worked for 10 years in software development, so I am able to write code on my own to my games. 

I am familiar with Unity and Game Maker Studio development tools. Currently I stick to Game Maker Studio, because at the moment I find it much more efficient to develop simple 2D games.

So to be clear the games I make and introduce here are simple 2D games, that can be made by a single game developer with limited artistic skills.