GDD: THEME AND BRAINSTORMING

      The final Game Design assignment of the year is finally here - work in groups of three to design a game and develop a game design document. I quickly paired with David and Nicolas (there blogs are below) to undertake this huge task but unfortunately  due to people not having any clear initial concepts, we were dictated our game's theme by the other teams (brilliant). My team (yet unnamed) has to work with a theme based around "Magic Spells". It's quiet vague, but we decided we didn't have to stick to the classic form of magic.

     With the idea of allowing ourselves a bit of freedom on this assignment, we started bouncing widely different ideas of each other. Nicolas went for classic fantasy, I used inspiration from an idea I had a couple of weeks ago, and David decided to strive for the less obvious "magic spells" variation. With these three in mind we came up with a great idea (we think) - Evolutionary Shapeshifting.

Our brainstorm ideas are below. I must note that at this stage, anything was agreed upon if it sounded fun, so the ideas on paper are quiet contradicting and in some cases, radical. 

MAGIC SPELLS - BRAINSTORMING NOTES

     We all agreed immediately that we want the player to have some form of shape shifting ability. I myself wanted these abilities to work together in synergy. The core concept however, was to ensure that the player feels like a one man army. After all, isn't that what you're supposed to do, make the player experience something they could never experience?

     So, the player would have multiple shape shifting forms, similar to prototype, but each form be radically different in it's theme, visuals and game play, rather than just having the obvious tank, solider, engineer and ranged classes (even though they would all in some way fit into those recognized categories). The twist is, these forms aren't independent of each other, you can string them together for different tactical advantages. If you have a winged formation and a fire formation, maybe you could use the wings after using fireballs to spread the fire around an area for added area damage (but less direct force).

The idea is a solid foundation, but I we need to flesh this out (obviously) and work out the cons. Anyway, we're all coming into university to get the idea down to a fine polish on Monday.

DAVID BARKER: GAME DESIGN BLOG

LINK

NICOLAS PISKORSKI: GAME DESIGN BLOG

LINK

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