Proposal (Week 1)

Outline – Project Description

My project is going to be all about aesthetics and immersing the player into a whole new world which is completely different, it will be full of bright neon lights and music which the scene pulsates along with.

There are many different things I am hoping to do, for this project, but I have no idea what I want my gameplay to be like, I personally prefer to design my gameplay on the spot, but at the moment I’m struggling to figure out how I want my game to flow. I had no idea whether I want my game to be a rhythm game, similar to Thumper, or whether I want to have my game be a 3D shoot-em-up game similar to Rez or StarFox, so I was thinking if I could find some way to combine the two.

One way of doing this is I wanted to have the gameplay be like StarFox, but the backgrounds and scenery of the game act like a rhythm game, pulsating with the beats of the music. But then, coming up with this idea made me think that the buildings in the city would be very violent and could crush the player at any moment. But then that just gave me another idea, to make the buildings like trampolines. If they come in contact with the player, the player gets flung into the air.

From there I had more ideas: it could just be a basic classic, relaxing game where the player is bounced around the city and they’re not allowed to touch the ground. They have to bounce between buildings, collecting points or bouncing as high as they can. But then that idea routed off into something else, where the player has to use these bouncy skylines to their advantage to launch themselves into enemies and destroy them.

I was really stuck on the idea of having a city full of bouncy skylines which bounce along with the music like a soundbar does.

My research into workflows on my critical report has made me realize that I am very lucky to be growing up now rather than 30 years prior when there really wasn’t any good game development software out there to help people make games.

Specifics – List of what I plan to include/create

I plan to make some sort of 3D rectangular building which moves up and down in time with the music, and then I wanted to copy this and make a whole city of them. But I want to make sure that I resize each of them so they’re all at different heights.

This would require me to make my own music with different layers which can be applied to their own different buildings. For example, a slow drum beat could be applied to a large building to indicate scale, and the fast drum beats could be applied to the smaller, thinner buildings to indicate faster movement. Then on top of these buildings, I plan to apply some sort of collision thing, where the block detects whether the player is collided with the building and launches them into the sky.

I also plan to make a grid shader, which I’ll apply to the ground. I’ll make sure HDR is enabled so I can make everything glow and look very outrun style. I’ll also have to make some sort of shader which will make lines through the orange large sun which I will have in the background of the game.

I want all my models to be very basic. I’m thinking I could make most of my environmental models myself out of basic cubes, but I haven’t decided on what I want to make the player yet.

Workflow – The process I plan to go through to create my project

I’m going to plan my workflow on the fly, since I feel I work the best that way.

I plan to first draw lots of concepts for what I want the scenery to look like, first starting with very basic concept sketches of the city and how I want the scene laid out. I then want to draw some concepts for the character, but I want to make sure that I draw a concept which I can easily recreate in low poly in Maya myself. I don’t want to make a fully detailed human concept and waste my time.

After I have done the concepts, or during the time I’m doing the concepts, I would start making the music early using my piano which I can plug into my computer to record MIDI sound files live in Mixcraft. Then I go from there making the music. The reason I’m going to do this is because I want to make my own music for my game. Once I’ve made the music, I’ll use that music to inspire my concepts and my art for the game, and most importantly my color palette.

I then plan to make my color palette, trying out multiple different palettes and seeing which one I like the most, but sticking to the Outrun/Cyberpunk/Cyberspace theme with the blacks mixed with bright colors.

Once I’ve done this, I’ll go into Unity and start off by trying to make this pulsating music thing and getting that working since I feel like that’s the most important feature.

Then I will go ahead with developing the rest of the game, most likely drawing concepts on the way as I come up with new ideas, instead of every single concept to-the-T at the beginning of development.

My view of how I want to make my game has changed since I began making games at game jams and working with lots of different people. I look back at some of the old games I’ve made at game jams and think that they could be so much better. I’ve learned from that, and I’ve learned that I’m not going to make those mistakes again.

Presentation

I plan to present my game on the Google Playstore, since I now have an account where I can upload my own games to the Playstore. Along with that, I would make promotional art for it, so posters and titles and screenshots which would be displayed on the Google Playstore. Instead of concept-art-looking pictures, it would be finished posters advertising the game.