Let Us Begin

posted in: Senior Team | 0

Senior Capstone at Champlain College is upon us and we are in the early phase of exploring various ideas that we can use for our Senior Game. My team consists of a Producer, two Programmers, and one Designer with a specialization in programming. As a team, we brainstormed ideas and concepts that we could use for our game. We narrowed the list down to roughly twenty ideas this past weekend, and from there chose four games that we want to explore deeper.

The list below contains the some of the ideas that we came up with. Some are just names while others are concepts.

  • Handegg: Tactics
  • Timewater
  • Sticky Hand Volcano
  • Alchemy puzzle
  • Mazecity Zelda-like
  • Grindsnake
  • Abstract shadows
  • Emotion controlling
  • Blob-organism puzzler
  • Tower of Babel
  • Lightchildren
  • Chance
  • A Boy and His Self-Contained Thermonuclear Reaction
  • Programming Simulator 2015
  • Orange Peeling Simulator
  • Universal Projector
  • My Hands Hate War
  • Tiny Massively Multiplayer Online Game
  • Tennis for Three
  • Divert Power to Anything!

There are four ideas that interested us the most that we want to delve deeper into:

  • Ripples
  • Global Player vs. Player Augmented Reality Game
  • Blade Surfing
  • Sumo Puzzle Fighter

Ripples pits players against each other in an arena over a body of water. Each player is a warrior with control over water, moving causes them to generated ripples. These ripples are then used to fight the other warriors instead of traditional weapons. If a player touches an opposing player’s ripple they will die. If two of a players own ripples intersect, they can then cause a detonation at the intersection dealing damage in a small radius.

The Augmented Reality Game is the teams biggest and riskiest idea, but we believe it to be our most innovative game we want to pursue. The idea is that all the players are participating in a game of assassination and theft. Through a series of semi-physical phone based challenges, a player can steal valuable items and assassinated nearby players. Through use of GPS technologies, valuables can be found around the globe and added to your collection. To hold on to their valuables, the players must outwit their would be thieves and assassins in the physical space.

Blade Surfing comes from the concept a using bladed weapons to descend down vertical faces by stabbing them into walls. The player makes their way down the side of a structure which is filled with enemies and obstacles. To navigate the player has two blades which they can stab into the wall. An exceptionally sharp blade with speed up the player more than just their natural fall speed. The dull blade will anchor the player to the wall. Using both blades that the same time will allow for the player to swing around the dull blade in a circle.

Sumo Puzzle Fighter has several areas of influence. The two major influences are from the head to head puzzler and the MOBA genres. In the game, the players will compete head to head in an abstracted sumo match. The players will each deal with three “lanes” of the puzzle, representing different body parts of their sumo wrestler. The puzzle component involves matching colors in columns and sending trash blocks to their opponent. The goal is to maintain a balance in your three lanes while trying to perform combos to unbalance the opponent.

For the next week or two we will be prototyping these for ideas to get a feel for how they play, from there we will then narrow it down to one final game to present. We split up the development of the prototypes among the two programmers and the designer. I will be working on “Sumo Puzzle Fighter” for the next blog will go more in depth with that.

– Jack Storm