Self Study 4 - Game Ideas

The group was formed around the idea of possibly making a rogue-like and/or vampire survivor type game. The following idea's lean into what makes those fun at the core, the idea of having a main mechanic to the game that can be achieved early to then add chaos later if time permits.

Game Idea 1 - Tower Ascension:

The first idea leans into the general aspect of a rogue-like, complete a objective/level in a room and move on. As with most of these games finishing the level would reward the player with a choice of modifications to their character.

The core mechanics:

1.  Complete the room objective (kill all enemies), fill a bar at the top of the screen to stop the enemies spawning.
2. Complete a secondary objective such as finding a key or push a button to open a door to the next level. Or as suggested below in figure 1, keep health of world object alive to survive level.
3. Once ascended gain a character mod (upgrade your twin sticks into something more menacing...)
 

Figure 1 - Tower Ascension game sketch.

Game Idea 2 - Endless Spawner:

The general vampire survivor type style, large open area usable by the character. Not much in the way of terrain here, but that could be an addition to the game in forms of traps (tar traps to slow enemies or fire traps to deal damage-over-time). 

The core mechanics:

1.  The character gains experience for killing enemies and levels up, a level up triggers a choice of upgrade. These upgrades can be the first mechanic to be added and don't have to be crazy to implement. This could involve adding simple damage modifiers, and as far as these games go they scale endlessly so as time progresses the character becomes "overpowered".
2. Enemies also grow in strength and speed as time progresses. This can be done with one enemy type to get a games functionality done early. As one enemy is completed more enemies can be added to add some variety to the game, from simple melee combat enemies such as skeleton warriors to more advanced enemies that throw projectiles.

Figure 2 - Endless Spawner game world.

Building the game can involve putting triggers for spawn points around the game world that are active or disabled by the characters location.
This can be seen illustrated below in figure 3.

Figure 3 -  Spawn trigger mapping.

Here the enemies would follow the character until they are killed, but the character can kill enemies to move where they please, enemies generally would spawn outside the screen and walk in but could also teleport into the camera view if desired. Spawning inside the camera view would most likely be more appropriate for projectile users such as mages but could also be built so that projectiles cannot be fired when outside the camera view.

This is just a few ideas toward the general goal of a endless spawning game and can be altered many ways. The beauty of building these types of games is that it can be a blessing or a curse to create, as early functionality is relatively easy to implement. As progress is made adding too many things can cause lots of bugs and can be a mess to clean up, this is also a good group game to make as everyone can start to implement components separate to each other in the general game world.

Thank you for reading!