Houston, We Have A Problem
Interestingly enough, but not too surprisingly, we’ve run into a couple important problems with our current game.
Our idea of followers seemed simple enough at the beginning, but as we continued to develop the game, it started giving us some complications. For one, we got stuck at the health system concept; we weren’t sure if each character in the group would have their own health, or if there would just be one health for the whole group. Another complication was the battle system. When it comes to monsters, should the characters attack all at once? Or one at a time? What does the main character do? Does he have any skills? It went on and on like that.
Eventually, we settled on having the main character just be the leader who calls on each of the followers to fight, which meant each of the followers would fight individually, one at a time. This also meant that each player gets his or her own health, and health decreases depending on the monster or boss; some characters are weak against certain monsters, but stronger against others, and the player gets to have fun with it and goes through a trial and error process to see what works and what doesn’t.
We also found that as we kept planning out the game, it got really convoluted; everything we wanted in the game would take more than just ten mere weeks to finish. At that point, our game ideas were heading towards something that would sound nice on Steam (hopefully). So we had to start limiting ourselves to make things simpler, or else we would never have any working game by the time we needed to present it. Some other good news was that professor said we only need to have a working level completed, not the entire game.
We narrowed things down, and put some tasks in order so that our game would be developed in a fashion that would ensure we’d have something working each step along the way.
First, we need to get the mechanics of the game working: have just one character be able to walk around on a map (without collision yet). Simple enough.
After that, we need to work on collision, be able to have more than one follower and make it so that followers are able to walk through each other (to avoid getting trapped in tight areas).
After these key points are done, we need to work on the script and the story. Throughout these weeks, we’re going to slowly build the documentation and the website to support the game.
