Trail of the Valkyrie Dev Blog #1
This week was the first week of work on our group work on our prototype mobile game. We were given the brief of creating a simple mobile game with the visual aesthetics of a pixel arcade style game. There were numerous different ideas that we had come up with. We needed to decide on a solid game idea that we could expand on. We ended up getting interested in a bullet hell and shoot 'em up sort of game, think of space invaders. The space them however is pretty redundant, especially with bullet hell type games, we needed to come up with an idea that would set it apart from other games that are already in the market place. As a joke vikings were brought up and we decided to roll with the idea. The game wouldn't be too serious and we could have the player growing spears or axes instead of using bullets or lasers. We started to research other similar games and try and figure out a sort of layout that we could have for ours. We found two games that we could draw some inspiration from; Space Invaders Infinity Gene (TAITO Corporation, 2013 and Xelorians (AXL Dynamics, 2014).
We originally had numerous different factors in the game idea. However we only have a three week development cycle for this prototype so in turn we had to get rid of a lot of desirables. We got rid of bosses, multiple levels and multiple power ups and upgrades we had originally planned. We ended up deciding to include a Berserker mode into the game to add something different to it. When the bar fills up the player will go into 'berserk mode' and their attack speed and damage will be increased.
This first week we focused on getting our idea solid and getting all documentation done by the beginning of next week. We have a short story completed for the game and we generally have all our roles sorted out. With this weeks tutorial we have our starts of the game set up so we can test on Android devices and we shall spend the rest of this week , aka the weekend studying up on some things as well as starting on creating the game mechanics. By the end of next week I want us to have already gotten all of the game mechanics working so that the rest of the time can be focused on testing for bugs and making it look pretty. I will already start working on creating the art assets I need to create. The most important thing is to get the mechanics done as soon as possible, they are the most important aspects to the game, without them we don't have a game. Visuals and audio can be focused on in the third week of development, however I will also start creating some of the visual aspects this week and next week.
My goals are to lead my team to get the mechanics done by the ned of next week, because we will need time to test it, see if others enjoy the game and get feedback on it. We need to get AI, player controls, the score, and the player field done and working.
Image References
AXL Dynamics . (2014, April 24). Xelorians - Space Shooter - Android Apps. Retrieved May 30, 2017, from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.axl.xelorians.full
TAITO Corporation. (2013, August 20). Space Invaders Infinity Gene - Android Apps. Retrieved May 30, 2017, from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.taito.am.siInfinityGene
