Starting with the very beginning, we had to decide on what the game should be. Our constraint was that it had to involve water in someway. We brainstormed for a few minutes coming and the first thing we nailed down is that we wanted to have zombies included somewhere. After that we had to decide what type of game we want. We weighed the pros and cons of making a side scroller, a platformer, and a shoot-em-up. We decided to go with shoot-em-up at the end.
Flesh Flood
Our next progress point was that we had to have a story set up to base everything off of. We changed this story throughout development, but our first version was the classic "zombie apocalypse with only one survivor" theme.
After we had the story we needed to build the characters. We decided on having the main character named Ralph and place him on a beach (to fulfill the water requirement). Next we discussed what kind of zombies we should have. During the development process for the zombies nothing changed in how the zombies acted. We all initially agreed on having a medium size-slower speed zombie, a tiny size-fast zombie, and a smaller size-fast zombie.
After we had the zombie animations completed we needed to give the zombies traits. Things like how the little ones should move faster and whatnot. We also had to do the same thing for Ralph. During this time we planned on having the game set so you can pick up different weapons so we had Ralph and the initial gun set as two different actors, but we couldn't figure out how to attach one to the other. To counter this problem we re-made the Ralph picture with him holding the gun.
Another problem we ran into with the gun was that the bullets that were fired would come from the center of Ralph instead of the barrel of the gun. We spent a good while trying to fix this and now it works perfectly.
After setting the characters up to react how they should we started getting a little fancier with the visuals. We knew that when we finished the core of the game we would be able to have some cool effects added in.
Near this point we realized we were wasting a lot of time just sending files back and forth to each other so we created a dropbox account and started sharing files this way.
One of our first file we sent to each other was the logo for the game. The logo was a usual flash flood warning sign but we changed the name to be Flesh Flood. A little play on words.
They next thing we focused on was the sounds that would be implemented. We recorded some of the sounds ourselves and then had other people record sounds that we wanted. As the game progressed we implemented sound where needed.
After playtesting the game we realized that it wasn't really rewarding to sit there and shoot zombies until you die and receive no reward. That's when we installed a scoring system into the game. Players earn points per zombie kill with each zombie worth a different amount of points, Something we want to do but haven't done is set a shop where players can spend their points. We started to work on the shop but needed a way to access it whenever was convenient. That's when we put in a pause button for players. Our plan is to have the screen change to the buying menu whenever the game is paused.
Next we decided that it would look nicer if the player wasn't just thrown into the game but could select when they wanting to start. That's when we threw in a menu screen with the options to view the story, play survival, or view the controls. Also at this point I realized our story was a little bland so we completely revamped it. The new story now goes that there was an oil rig in the ocean that had some sort of accident and starting turning workers into zombies. Then the zombies started to swim to the mainland. We are still working on why Ralph was on the beach with a gun to start.
While we were playtesting the game we noticed that if you shoot the words on the menu screen they start to move. We took advantage of this by setting it so whenever those words get it they explode into fragments. This added a nice visual effect to the game.
As of now our final piece of work was adding a death scene into the game. Following the oil theme we have it set so when Ralph dies a wave of oil flows across the screen.
We have plenty of ideas to make this game better, but in the time allotted we tried to make a playthrough ready. Maybe later we can implement the rest of our ideas.
Download .swf file
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