As many of you know, I’m attending my final (oft delayed) semester at the University of Victoria right now – finishing off my final four courses. One of these courses is an elective, CSC 167: Game Strategy, Interaction and Design – what I normally refer to as “the video game course”. It is more than just video games, we covered the history of video game consoles, basic concepts, common themes and common problems. The fun part of the class comes with the group project.
Part 1 – Designing a game
The project was split into two parts, part 1 – designing a game, and part 2 – implementing someone else’s game. For the first part, we created the concept of the Stock Market Rollercoaster, where you would pilot a small rollercoaster along a track generated by a stock you entered into the game.
Part 2 – Building a game
We were assigned a game called “Base Jump” and the premise was a hero was blasted off a rooftop and had to fight for survival on the resulting fall down the front of the building. As we are the first to present our game to the class, we wanted to put something together quickly, so we made a few design decisions. The first was not to have any fighting, this adds a lot of complexity to the game, and as we started putting everything together we realized we could make something fun just by having the main character avoid obstacles and pick up objects for extra points. As we started designing objects to avoid (these included squeegee wielding pirates, zombie bunnies and more) I started wondering if there was a better way to keep the look of the game consistent as well as having the objects be a different colour than the scrolling background of the building. Then it came to me – FIRE! Once I had that idea the game came together really quickly, you’d avoid fire on the way down, and if you caught on fire you would have to catch a water balloon to put out the fire or the game would end. After that the bonus objects were easy (falling kittens of course), and I inserted a few other random elements as well.
Try out the game and let me know what you think!
