Game Prototypes
Thumbnail for the prototypes
In this project, the main outcome of what I wanted to find out, was "what makes games fun?". To do this, I experimented by playing already existing games and try to figure out why they are fun and try to create my own game prototypes based on the information I have gathered.
Planning
The first stage of the project was to plan the prototypes that I wanted to create. I did this through writing down the ideas that I had for the games as well as drawing basic concepts for what it would look like.
First Person Shooter prototype:
The first game I decided to plan was the First Person Shooter prototype. Although the game I wanted to create isn't technically an FPS game, I was inspired by already existing and popular FPS games (such as Call of Duty and Valorant) and implemented as many elements as I could from those games.
For the planning stages of each game, I decided to plan what the game would look like. I planned the UI the game would have and some of the mechanics I wanted to implement, such as the shop mechanic.
UI concept for the FPS prototype.
The scoreboard UI that I wanted to implement that could be toggled on and off.
Shop UI concept.
Ideas:
There will be many different weapons that the player can get from pistols to assault rifles to snipers, with each one costing more points the better it is. The first weapon that the player starts off with is a pistol with 8 ammo per magazine and 32 ammo to start off with. More ammo can be gained from either spending points or getting ammo drops from enemies. The better the weapon, the more expensive the ammo would be to buy.
As the player progresses through the waves, the harder the enemies become. They will increase in health and in number as well as getting better weapons. The higher the wave you are in, the easier it is to get points so that you can buy weapons that would make it easier.
The player has a certain amount of health that is dependent on the difficulty. When the player either gets hit with a bullet or touches an enemy, they will be invincible for a few seconds before they can get hit again. The player gains all of their health back after every round, and if they are lucky, can get a health drop from killing enemies.
There will be 4 difficulties that the player can choose from - easy, normal, hard and insane. Easy mode gives the player 5 hearts and there will be less enemies per round. Normal gives the player 4 hearts with slightly more enemy per round. Hard gives the player 3 hearts with more enemy spawns. Insane gives the player 1 heart with a very large amount of enemies per round.
Weapons - pistol, dual pistols, heavy pistol, automatic pistol, submachine gun, shotgun, semi automatic rifle, assault rifle, sniper rifle, light machine gun. Each weapon has their own damage, bullet speed and reload speed, with the better weapons costing more than the first weapons.
To save time, there will only be 1 map or area that this game takes place in which is an open area with the enemies moving in from around the edges of the map. The player can only move around the area that they can see so that it makes it harder for them, while also making it fair.
There will be power ups that the enemy drops randomly. These include a damage powerup that doubles your damage for a certain amount of time, an ammo powerup that doesn’t use ammo for a certain amount of time and a health powerup that makes you invincible for a certain amount of time.
The controls will be relatively simple: WASD to move, use mouse to shoot and aim, TAB to look at the scoreboard and B to open the buy menu.
Survival prototype:
For the survival prototype, I also looked at games that I felt had elements that I wanted to use in the game I wanted to create (I mainly looked at Minecraft and Terraria).
UI concept for the survival prototype.
Inventory UI concept.
Crafting UI concept.
Building UI concept.
Ideas:
The day/night cycle of the game will be a certain amount of time for both day and night. It would be around 5 - 10 minutes for day and around the same time for night. This would introduce mechanics such as sleeping. When the player sleeps, it would skip to the start of the day as well as fully healing the player.
The progression system in the game has different levels of materials that all have different strengths. You start off with a weak axe so that you can get the first essential materials. The first and weakest material would be wood, which you get from chopping down trees. It can make essential things such as tools, armour, weapons and base building materials such as walls and floors. The next material would be stone, which can be obtained from mining rocks on the surface. Stone can make better variants of wood gear. The next material is iron found in caves, then gold, also found in caves. The best material is titanium, found in rarer caves that are in more challenging areas of the map.
The cave mechanic in the game is very simple with cave entrances being around the map that can be entered to go into the caves. Each cave contains different resources from just stone and iron to rarer materials such as gold and titanium. The rarer the resource in the caves, the harder the caves are to get to and get the materials, due to the caves containing more challenging enemies and the areas they are located in being harder to traverse.
The inventory mechanic will also be very simple with an inventory that holds items with a certain amount of slots. There would need to be a cap for the max amount of items in a slot so the player can’t hold too much as it would make the game a lot easier (around 50 or 100 depending on the item). There would also need to be a certain amount of slots, which could be upgraded with an item, such as a backpack. The max amount of slots can be 10 at the start and can be upgraded with a backpack, bringing it up to around 20. There wouldn’t be many items overall in this game, so there would need to be less slots to make it more balanced. This can also be helped with chests that you can put in your base to store items.
The building mechanic in this game allows you to build your own base, with restrictions. There would be floors, walls, windows and doors to make your base as well as some furniture to make your base look nicer such as chairs, tables, a workbench to craft better items and a furnace to smelt ores and cook food. You can make better, stronger building materials to work with, such as stone and iron. I feel as if there doesn’t need to be any gold or titanium building materials, except for maybe furniture. All of these can be rotated so that the base can have walls on all sides.
There will be a map that the player can use to see where they are in the world. The map will be a simple outline with some coloured areas to show different biomes, with an icon to show where the player is. Whenever the player moves or enters a different area, an icon on the map will move to show when the player moves.
There will be a health and hunger mechanic that the player needs to manage. The player will have 100 max health that they cannot change in any way. The player is very vulnerable to damage at the start of the game, taking around 20 - 30 damage per hit from an easy enemy. When the player manages to get armour, such as wooden armour, it will decrease the damage taken slightly to 18 - 28. The player can heal any damage taken by either eating food or sleeping through the night. The better the armour, the more the damage is decreased. The hunger mechanic is also a bar that needs to be managed in order to survive longer. The hunger bar also has a value of 100 that slowly decreases over time. In order to increase it, the player needs to find and eat food. If the hunger bar gets to 0, they die. If the player dies, they drop a gravestone that contains all of their items in their inventory. When the player interacts with the gravestone, they get everything they dropped back.
There will be different enemies in the game that include zombies and skeletons. There could be different levels of enemies with the easiest being where the player starts and the hardest being on the other side of the map in harder areas. This would keep the game interesting and not just 1 difficulty throughout the game, which would make it less fun and a lot easier. The higher level enemies would have more health and do more damage.
The controls will be simple, but have on screen prompts to learn them: WASD to move, mouse to aim and navigate through menus, TAB to go into inventory, I to go to crafting menu, B to go into build menu.
Horror Prototype:
For the Horror prototype, I looked at Phasmophobia and Five Nights at Freddy's which gave me many ideas for what my game should include. In the end I decided to recreate a Phasmophobia map in 2D and create a horror game based on that.
Map layout for my horror game / Phasmophobia.
Ideas:
I will recreate a level from phasmophobia entirely, from rooms to working stairs and doors. There will be a few changes so that the game doesn’t take too long to make, such as some of the furniture and objects that are in some of the rooms. Apart from a few minor details, I will try to make the level exactly the same.
I’ll try to add as many elements from phasmophobia that make it scary. One of the main things that I would focus on is the environment and mood the environment creates. Everything would be completely dark, which can be seen with a flashlight. The game would also have other elements that make a game scary that aren’t in phasmophobia, such as jumpscares (if it seems like a good idea at the time) as it would be difficult to add other scary elements into the game, due to the game being 2D instead of 3D.
The flashlight mechanic will be simple yet essential to be able to see in the dark. The whole level will be completely dark apart from certain areas or if the player turns a light on. The flashlight will point towards wherever the cursor is on the screen, but only covers an area in front of the player. The flashlight can also be turned off, for whenever the ghost is near the player, preventing the ghost from seeing the player.
Like in phasmophobia, there could be hiding places that the player can hide in, such as a locker. This would prevent the ghost from finding the player, but prevents the player from seeing anything around them, which includes where the ghost is.
Unlike phasmophobia, the main goal in this game would be to escape the house. There would be things around the house that you can get to help you escape such as keys. While you try to get all of the items, the ghost will try to kill you as it gets more aggressive the longer you are in the area.
The controls will be very simple: WASD to move, mouse to look around, E to interact.
Although I thoroughly planned out what I wanted the base games to look like, most of the things that I had planned either didn't make it into the final game, or needed to change due to it not working the way I intended. This is also due to time constrains I had to finish the project as I had around 5 - 6 weeks left to create all 3 games. Everything that I listed as my ideas, are things that I would have liked the games to have if I had no time limit.
Production:
The next stage of my project is the production stage, where I develop and create the game prototypes. To develop the games, I took my ideas and refined them as well as taking out ideas I though would take too long to implement or would be too hard to create.
First Person Shooter:
The first thing I focused on was creating the basic UI, which included the players health, the wave number, enemies left, points and ammo. While creating these, I set them up so I could easily implement variables that could change them depending on a certain thing happening ( player shoots > bullets decrease by 1).
FPS UI in game.
The next part I wanted to focus on was the shop mechanic. I created a basic placeholder sprite so that I could focus on creating a working mechanic and then create better sprites. For now, the shop system just increased the player's damage by 1, if they have the required amount of points.
Placeholder shop sprite I used.
I also finished the ammo mechanic. Whenever the ammo gets to 0, the player reloads the gun, which stops the player from shooting for a few seconds, then changes the ammo from 0 to 8 then the stock ammo is decreased by 8.
Bullets shot decreases the amount of ammo.
After getting the shop mechanic working, I then focused on the enemies. At first I allowed the enemies to decrease the players health once they collide (which decreases the health bar in the top right) and also made the enemies follow the player. I felt this was too easy so I decided to make the enemies shoot at the player and stay around the edges of the room instead of following the player. Personally I think this is more enjoyable as well as being more challenging and makes the game into more of a bullet hell game.
Player taking damage and dying and enemies shootign
While making the enemies, I decided to make a visual improvement by adding a visual weapon that follows the player as well as following the direction of the mouse.
Player holding weapon.
After finishing the enemies, I wanted to improve the shop sprite as well as creating more weapons for the player to buy, with each one they buy being more expensive and progressively more powerful.
Improved shop UI sprite.
While implementing the other weapons, I also created shop sprites for them. Each sprite shows the name of the weapon, the weapon icon, the weapon stats, the ammo capacity and the cost.
All shop sprites.
Once I had finished the shop mechanic and improved the wave mechanic, I decided to stop production of the game and move onto the next. These are the objects and sprites I created for this game.
All objects and sprites I created for the FPS prototype.
Survival prototype:
The first thing I focused on was the UI for the game as well as making a few sprites such as a tree sprite, an apple sprite and a stick sprite. I also set up the players health, and created a separate object with different health to manage the hunger the player has and I created a simple hot bar that the player can navigate through.
Survival UI in game.
Apple, tree and stick sprites.
I then created the tool sprites and animations as well as improving the hot bar so that the player can see what slot they are selecting. They can select the slots by using the scroll wheel or using 1 - 5. The first tool the player starts off with is the "old axe" which allows the player to chop down trees to get wood, sticks and also apples. The apples increase the hunger bar when used and also heals the player.
Tool sprites (old axe, wooden axe, wooden pickaxe, wooden sword).
Tool animations (I created them in game maker, so I could not export the images separately).
I then created the tree animations (hit and destroy) so that I could implement them into the game and allow the player to know when they are hitting the tree and when it is destroyed.
Tree hit and destroy animations (I also created these animations in game maker).
After getting the trees to work in the game, I decided to create an inventory that the player can hold items in. The inventory is very simple with each item having its own dedicated slot in the inventory, as it is a lot easier to both create and for the player to understand.
Player chopping down a tree and getting a stick, which goes into their inventory.
While experimenting with the crafting UI, I changed the design and made it a lot easier to navigate as well as use. The player can now create a crafting bench by going into their inventory and pressing Q (if they have the required materials). When the player stands near the crafting bench, the crafting interface shows up allowing them to craft wooden tools. The other tools were then implemented with each one having different uses and having different use speeds.
Player using the crafting bench and using all of the available tools.
The final things that I implemented into the game were giving the rest of the tools a use. The wooden axe breaks trees slightly faster, the wooden sword is used to attack enemies (of which I have used a simple placeholder to test a combat mechanic) and the pickaxe is used to destroy rocks to get stone.
Player using the sword to destroy an enemy object and using a pickaxe to destroy a rock.
After this I decided to stop developing this game as I had created all of the basic elements that I wanted. I also needed to move onto the next game and didn't have long left to finish the project.
These were all of the objects and sprites I had created throughout the production of this game. This game had both more objects and sprites than the FPS game due to the mechanics needing multiple objects to work properly and there being more content overall that was implemented.
All objects and sprites created for the survival prototype.
Horror prototype:
The first thing I focused on was the layout of the map. I created a tile set that was made up of walls in all directions as well as corner walls. This allowed me to make the basic shape of the map. After I made the basic shape, I created wall objects that I put over the tiles to create collisions.
Map layout (plan and tiles).
I then created a flashlight object that follows the player and points towards the mouse. When the player presses F, the flashlight creates another object that lights up an area in front of the player and reveals hidden items, such as keys. While making the flashlight, I created a simple rain effect that plays until the player collides with an object that turns the effect off.
Flashlight revealing key.
I created another tile set which I used for the flooring of the house. I filled every room with what tile I thought would fit it. I also created a stairs sprite, which I put near the front of the door where the stairs were on the plan.
Tile sets I used to create the house with.
House layout with floor tiles.
I created a darkness object that changes opacity once the player enters and leaves the object. This stops the player from being able to see hidden objects through walls when using their flashlight. I also added doors that open when the player presses E near them and closes when the player walks away from them.
Darkness object changing opacity and player opening/closing door.
I created the upstairs section and basement section the same way I created the first floor (same as what I had planned) all in the first room. I put objects on the entrances and exits on all floors that move the player to a specific spot, making it look like the player is going up and down stairs and into the basement.
Basement and second floor.
player going in/out of basement and up/down stairs.
I created a better starting area for the game, which required me to make a road sprite, another floor tile and a tree sprite.
Outside area layout.
Outside area with trees and a road leading to the house.
I created maps that show up whenever the player collides with a map object. The maps show the player where they need to go next to progress. The first 2 maps tell the player where keys are and the next 2 tell the player where to go (first one garage and second one run out of the house. There are arrows that point to wherever the player needs to go next. When the player completes another objective (collects a key) the previous arrow disappears and the next one is created.
I made a simple ending for the game which is just the player going back the way they came from. I would have made a better ending, but at this point I had very little time left to add any more into the game.
Player going back to the start and game closing.
All objects and sprites I created for the horror prototype.
For now all of the games are finished and at a point where they are playable and have content that is relatively enjoyable. Each game took me around a week and a half to make, so I am pretty happy with what I have created considering the timeframe I had to create them.
Once I had finished all of the games, I had made them playable through GX games:
