Game Vision Statement

Game Vision Statement

Fantasy forest image

Source: Needpix.com

Introduction:

“Eterna Hunt” (placeholder title) is a first person survival game in which the player is thrown into a fantasy world and must build a shelter, gather resources and defend themselves and survive for seven in game days. “Eterna Hunt” is an open world game, that will feature a number of different environments and mechanics. It will be a PC game built using the Unity 2017 engine. This game is intended for an audience of 12+ due to minor violence.

Description:

You wake up from a deep slumber and find yourself at the edge of a dense unnaturally coloured fairy forest with giant trees and plants with absolutely nothing in your inventory besides an empty journal and a stick of charcoal. You can see a looming volcano and a tundra in the distance. Your stomach rumbles- you’re peckish. All the surroundings are very foreign and unfamiliar to you. You don’t know how long you’ll be here for.. the sun is rising in the sky, daylight is burning. You must construct a shelter to shield yourself from the elements and surrounding creatures. The creatures you can see now are docile, which would make good hunting targets. Perhaps you could tame one of these creatures to have as a companion and help protect you. Though, you don’t know any of these plants or animals, so you will have to be careful with what you eat so you don’t poison. You can keep record of edible flora and fauna in your journal.

Night will soon fall, and you can hear growling the howling in the distance. The peaceful creatures run for shelter.. and from the incoming hostile mobs. Prepare your weapons if you haven’t set up your shelter yet- and fight for your life. The creatures of the night are unforgiving. If you manage to strike some down, you can use their carcasses to gather meat and parts to make stronger weapons. Be careful though- it gets extremely cold at night, so you’ll want to make a fur coat or stick by a fire to avoid taking frost damage. The volcanic area is unbearably hot, but some gemstones that can be found throughout the map have a cooling effect.

Civilization will find you in seven days time, deeming you safe. Can you survive until then?

Key Features

•  First person open world survival
•  Fantasy elements     
• Temperature, day/night cycle, hunger and poison mechanics to make gameplay challenging     
• Tamable fauna that protects the player (not set and stone).    
• Gameplay is timed- 7 in game days.

Game Genre

“Eterna Hunt” is a first person open world survival game based in a fantasy setting. The player must survive for 7 in game days in order to win the game.

Intended Audience

“Eterna Hunt” is intended for an audience of 12+ due to minor violence and the difficulty of the game. The gameplay of this game is intended to be challenging with the use of mechanics and would be very difficult for younger players.

Gameplay

“Eterna Hunt” is a first person open world survival game that runs over the course of 7 in game days in which the player must survive to complete the game. The player must construct a shelter to shield from the elements and the hostile mobs during the night. The player will grow hungry over the course of the day so they must gather plants and hunt to sustain their hunger. When hunger reaches 0, the game ends. When the health bar reaches 0, the game also ends. The player takes damage when exposed to the elements with no proper equipment, when poisoned and when attacked. These can be combated by consuming an antidote, constructing protective clothing and staying near fire. The player can also tame certain fauna that will be their companion and fight for the player.

Resources required

•        Unity 2017 assets for models of the flora and fauna of the game would be required, along with a multitude of textures to use in the terrain and for the flora and fauna. Models can also be created manually if there are no existing assets that would suit the game, though tutorials would be needed to execute this.

•        Script for required mechanics such as the health bar, the hunger bar, the temperature mechanic, the poison mechanic and the tamable fauna mechanic. There are many existing tutorials for scripting mechanics that could be used to execute the desired mechanics- such as this tutorial on how to implement a health bar such as this one.

            This page contains numerous weather related scripts including cold damage.

Final Fantasy XV Gameplay screenshot (PS4)

Source: Flickr

Unity Tutorial 03

Unity Tutorial 03

This week I tackled the third Unity tutorial which involved making a functional clock!

I had some difficulty with my laptop last week, and because of that and poor time management I was unable to complete the 2nd tutorial (though I will complete that one soon!)

I found the beginning of this tutorial straightforward and easy to follow- it took me a little thinking to wrap my head around why I had to create loads of new parents for the hour indicators but I executed it successfully and built my clock with little problem.

However, when it came to the C#... I struggled. A lot.

At first, I understood it a little bit and followed the coding. However, the further I went on typing the code the more difficult and confusing I found it. I didn't like how the tutorial made you type out a big line of code and tell you immediately after that you can type it in a much shorter simpler way.

I managed to get down to the public bool continuous part, but noticed that my Unity wasn't responding to my saved code to add the Continuous option. I'm not sure what I did wrong here, but I played around with it for quite a while but it wouldn't work no matter what I did. 

Because of this I didn't end up with a functioning clock.

In the future I hope to get a better understanding of C# so I can know where I went wrong, and to help me in the future.

Screenshot of Unity and Coding

Source; My Laptop

Games MDA

Games MDA

This week’s reading taught me about the MDA framework- standing for Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics. This framework was initially unfamiliar to me; I had not heard of this framework before doing this reading so it was very informative and helped me grasp the concept of the MDA framework.

I did the readings on the MD 2019 CDM site, which you can read by clicking the link. 

Mechanics refers to the constraints of how a game works- it determines the actions a player can take in the game and how these actions affect the game. From my understanding- mechanics refer to elements of the game that determine and affect the gameplay. Examples of mechanics in games I have played include respawning, day and night cycles, reloading ammo, drowning, hunger and temperate mechanics.

Dynamics refer to how the game plays when the mechanics are implemented. For example, in the case of a temperature mechanic- how do players overcome this? What strategies do they come up with to overcome this? In my personal experience, a game that demonstrates this well is Breath of the Wild. In order to climb icy mountains, the player must stay warm or they will take damage. There are multiple ways to do this- get warm armour, carry around a torch, or a fire weapon. Strategizing emerges from dynamics.

Aesthetics refer not to the look of the game but to the player experience of the game. This emerges from the dynamics of the game- if the dynamics are difficult for players then the players will feel frustrated, if there are very basic and repetitive dynamics the player will feel bored. Essentially, it’s how “fun” a game is, but fun is a very broad term so it is slit into several sections.

This site goes into more detail about the MDA model!

I personally have never looked so far into what elements make a game “fun”, so seeing it broken down into the eight categories gave me a new insight on the term “fun”. I feel that this will be helpful in not only giving feedback to others on their project but also help me understand any feedback I receive properly.

I feel that this reading has given me a lot of understanding about the MDA model and it will help me in my game development in future.

Screenshot of views of games 

Source: MD 2019 CDM site