THE GAMES DESIGN

To begin with I have had to change my design alot for this game. For instance in my initial design I didnot plan to have an AI partner that is Timmy(the dog). But now I do. I chose todo this because this did make the game much more interesting interms of gameplay mechanics. My AI partner doesnot really have advanced AI behaviour as such.

The AI simply follows you around and I designed this way because the dog is also a playable character. For starters if the player switches to play as the dog, they are able to see items they could not previously see(This is when the player switches to dog senses mode when they switch to dog). Dog senses mode reveals which paths the player should take if they are lost or if its not very obvious as to were the should go to next. This is a helpful feature interms of player feedback and information. The other thing that makes playing as the dog different from playing as Dick (one of the four children which the player will play as) is that there are some areas which only Timmy the dog can access. For instance in one of my levels the castle dungeons, the player arrives at a locked gate which can only be opened from the otherside so the player has to use Timmy to get through a small space inorder to get to the otherside of the gate and open the gate for Dick (yes I know dogs cannot open locked doors or gates but this is a game and if it adds to the gameplay why not?) . The player can change between these two characters at will during the game by simply pressing the "RB" button on the XBOX360 controller (If I forgot to mention then well the game uses a 360 controller).

Making the decision to have this sort of gameplay mechanic really opened a world of ideas for the game design and required a drastic change in most of the games design as a whole, seeing as I didnot plan to implement this in my first design. Ofcourse implementing and balancing this mechanic to work in the game was quit challenging but thats a story for another post.

The other major change in my design was cutting down on levels. In my initial design document I planned to have four levels which included a tutorial level by the beach, a level on the shipwreck, a level in the castle dungeons and a level in which the player is escaping from the island. I also planned to have sections in which the player was required to sail to the island in a row boat. As implementation of the game started and I began to familiarise myself with the Unreal level editor I realised that designing and building levels takes alot of time. There was no way I was going to be able to build four levels and program the game at the sametime and finish intime. I decided to cutdown on some of the levels. In its current state the game now only contains two levels, the beach level which serves as a tutorial level and the castle dungeon level. I will talk about these level in more detail in my upcoming posts and I will also be posting screen shots of the game.