The Kingdom Restored Update #4

I backtracked some from my intentions. I wanted to start building a prototype to start testing out my gameplay and to have something I could share with you all. I figured I’d start with the basic player movements. So, as I started building my Unity project, my senioritis kicked in and I felt dumb. My game is a platform side-scroller which is a common type. So DUH, most everyone has already played that type of game and knows about walking, running, jumping, etc. that occurs. So why am I doing this? Yeah BIG DUH! I scrapped that and went back into my design mode.

All the reading I had done about game design finally hit me like a brick, no make that a wrecking ball. I hadn’t really achieved much regarding my game design. Sure, I had a concept document which I’ve shared, but that is obviously not enough to make a game. Especially since this is my first true game (as opposed to the games built while working on tutorials). I had a lot more work to do. Since my last post, I’ve been really focused on detailing the mechanics, graphics, and audio components of the game.

During my time after work and my days off, I started writing out how I was going to make the game. I wrote out more detail at a high level on my levels, characters, etc. I then broke those down into more detail. For each level I’ve been creating a narrative of what I envision the player to see and experience. As a subset of the narrative, I created sections for graphics and audio. That way I could make notes about each without having to leave the page for that level. If it was something more global, I would jump over to my graphics or audio document to make the appropriate commentary. As I am using OneNote to document everything, it wasn’t that confusing or difficult to do.

So where does that leave me? Well I’ve got a better definition of my characters; better descriptions of my levels; and a general idea of the music and sound effects I’ll need. Not much visually to share, but I feel a lot better on the direction the game development is going. In the course of doing all this I’ve been referring back to my books and articles. I’ve also created a couple of documents, based on info and examples from my resources, to help me document what I’ll need to do going forward. I’m attaching them to this post, feel free to download and see for yourself. If you have any questions or feedback I’d like to hear from you.