Assignment 2 video game design
My game is entitled “The One Path”.
The game begins in the real world, where you stumble through a forest, lost and without hope. Going through a labyrinth of cliffs, you battle the forest creatures and become stronger.
To beat the stronger monsters and enter the next world, you must battle some imps which are guarding some armor and weapons. After defeating some of the imps, others start fleeing. Weather you chase and destroy them changes the course of your journey.
As with the two sides of a coin, the paths of good and evil are infinitely close, yet exactly opposite. There is one path. It just depends on which direction will you travel on it.
So you start in the forest and make your decision which path you will take.
You enter into another dimension – representing the good or evil path; icy peaks or fiery caverns. However you have one last chance to change your mind, and go the other way. You can’t go back to the forest, because the portal is a one way trip. The first person you encounter is a small girl standing over a large sword. She says it is a very valuable sword that she’s protecting for her father. She tells you to stay back, and picks up the sword in self defense. Will you take it? leave her alone?
If you follow your original path of good/evil, the dimension is your haven where you can train and gain information about the worlds, however if you go against your first choice, you are now in enemy territory.
After battling through the perils of this dimension, gaining items and skills, you enter into the opposite side of the coin.
In both worlds you find others who have been trapped there by one way portals, but towards the end of your journey, you find a group who have redirected the portal, and you find yourself back in the forest. It is very different from before. When you make your way back through the maze of cliffs, you see a figure that looks ominously similar to yourself. Yet different.. quite the opposite.
The game starts of easy, with woodland creatures as enemies. As the game progresses, enemies get more powerful and the complexity of battle rules increases. Also the battle rules for the two moral choices are different.
If you are ‘good’ – taking physical damage causes the opponent to lose twice as much damage. And physical damage you inflict also damages you, so it’s more effective to use magic.
If you are ‘evil’ if you pass an enemy without destroying it, twice as many enemies appear up ahead. So if you don’t battle anyone and run ahead to the goal, you will encounter a hoard of enemies that won’t let you pass.
The interaction with the stranded characters from the real world also changes depending on which side you stand.
If you are ‘good’, then you can get better items by befriending them and gaining their trust, however if you try to attack them, they will drop inferior items. The opposite is true for if you are ‘evil’. If you attack and destroy them, you are left with better items.
There are certain challenges you need to accomplish before proceeding to the next world. You need to find seven keys in order to unlock the door to the next world. The keys are scattered on the level so you need to explore it.
Before you go through the door, you also need to defeat the guardian of the door in order to go through it.
I used basic landscape functions to make the terrain, and portals. I then added some objects for scenery, items, monsters and other characters.
I made some containers with items in them, and changed some of the lighting (in the caverns it is always night, in the icy peaks, it is always day.)
I didn’t know how to implement some aspects of my initial design, and don’t know if it is possible in the engine. Such as:
Using the same map, but having the monsters and human characters change in it depending on game decisions, (reusing the map, but having different functions depending on what part of the game you’re in)
Having some of the battle rules (physically damaging a monster causes damage to you/ not destroying a monster causes more to appear)
The decisions in the game – there are two versions of the game, that can happen on the same maps. The decisions should change the game. There is only one portal in the forest, and it leads to one of the other maps, depending on your decisions.
Because these functionality are hard to model, I made all the scenery, visuals, characters, items etc. But the game doesn’t function as it would if it was fully completed.
