Armageddump: Game Design

 Armageddump: Game Design

(The main post about this game can be found here)

The context:

 When I joined the team for this jam, it was very much as a programmer. I was suprised to find myself in quite a large team, although that was explained somewhat because the discord was a team that had done a number of previous jams together, and people would either take part in a jam or sit it out, either completely or only offering advice. The work for this jam was also quite split; there were a lot of artists and composers for instance, but each only created assets for one boss or so, meaning it roughly equated to fewer people putting more time in. After the jam started and the theme was announced, some of the ideas were amalgomated into the concept for our game. The project manager wrote a rough description of the bosses, with some attacks outlined but little more detail than that. To flesh out the game enough to start programming, a designer was invited to the project, but the concept didn't interest them. At that point, wanting to get on with the game, I volunteered to design the game to an extent where I could tell the artists, composors and the other programmer what needed to be done.

Producing a Game Design Document:

 I tried to take into account the intial concept when creating a full GDD. For each boss, I first defined the feeling of the fight and the broad mechanics governing it, before fleshing out its attacks, including which attacks would be prioritied when and their interactions. I also needed to create a full story to tie together the bosses, again based off ideas in the concept, and define the weapons that the player would use. Importantly, I also tried to keep in mind the implementation diffuculty, and not design anything that would be too hard for us to make.

The Bosses:

From the initial idea, the bosses I needed to design were a training dummy, a jack-in-the-box, and a Kaiju (certainly a strange mix). I wanted to make each boss feel unique, and have a different way of defeating each boss.

The Dummy:

The completed dummy model
 
For the dummy fight, I wanted the fight to be a game of learning the boss' attacks and avoiding them until the boss showed an opening. To defeat the attacks, the player would have to do things like jump them or interrupt the dummy. My aim was to introduce the player to 'the boss is doing X, so I should do Y' gameplay that I'd use throughout the rest of the bosses to a lesser extent. This was the one boss I didn't program, and I think the programmer for this did a great job making the boss feel polished in terms of effects. I think the fight could have used more telegraphing, so that the player could more easily recognise what they needed to do for each attack (perhaps with colours to show which attacks could be ducked/jumped).

Jack:

 
The finished Jack model

For the jack fight, I wanted to make use of the jack-in-the-box theming and make this fight slightly more of a puzzle. I went with a conventional healthbar system this time, but the boss would periodically disappear, leaving a bunch of boxes around the arena. To find the correct one, you had to look at the colour of the boss' last attack, and hit the relevant box, causing the Jack to pop out and the fight to continue. If you were wrong, smaller Jacks would also pop out of all the incorrect boxes and spit bullets at the player. Due to time constraints (mostly caused by delays in getting assets) this fight could use more polish and ideally a 'popping out' animation to really sell the theming behind it. I think the main puzzle of the fight with the colours works well; again with more time I might have added some elements to hint the answer to the player if they repeatedly got it wrong, probably through text.

The Kaiju:

The Kaiju, sadly missing a texture

The kaiju fight was the conclusion of the game, so I wanted to make the most of the Kaiju's size to really make this fight feel special. I had the fight take place on a circular hill, with the Kaiju standing towering over it. On top of this, I added a fog effect, and gave the Kaiju a move where it retreated back, reappearing at a random angle from the fog, to add to the tension of the fight. For the fight itself, I tried to tie together the story elements into the fight. The idea was that the kaiju's presence had brought things on the dump to life, being the previous bosses and (although the player would not know this), the character themself. In doing this, it had embedded a gem in each of them, which the player would use with sticks (which must be gathered during the fight) to destroy the gems on the kaiju's head and defeat it. I originally planned that for the last gem, the player would reach into their own chest and pull out the gem (showing that they too had been animated by the kaiju), and have to hit the last gem before the screen faded to black. Sadly, I only got the model at the last minute (and never got a texture) which didn't give me enough time to pull this off correctly, both in this fight and in setting up the story properly with dialougue, as I was only able to finish the fight immediately before the deadline.

Conclusion:

 While unexpected, it was an interesting experience designing this game, and I think I'm quite happy with how I designed it. While the story didn't come across as I wanted due to the late assets, I think each fight had the feeling behind it I was going for. I really enjoyed designing and making the fights different, and trying to bring out story elements in the gameplay.

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