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Short form:
Cityscape Deathmatch (working title)
Story:
It's a sunny spring day and the Incidental Alien Invasion Conference (IAIC'05) is convening in Sky City. The aliens are trying to find parking spaces for their giant mechanized death machines when, for no reason at all, the humans start attacking them! Outraged at both the lack of urban planning and the nerve of these puny humans, the aliens (academic and industry icons in the field of mechanized death) start attacking the city, and each other!
Keiko and the Sky City High School breakdancing team are practicing for their regional meet in the SCHS gymnasium when an extraterrestial rumble overpowers the fresh cuts and jams of their corner boombox. Startled, they run outside just in time to see the shadows of almost half a dozen flying flying saucers emerge from the clouds. Knowing harbingers of doom when they see them, the girls grab the weapons from their secret hideout under the gym and leave to protect the city!
Project Description
What kind of game are we going to build?
Cityscape Deathmatch is a colorful, not very serious romp through the first person shooter genre. Each player controls a hovering spacecraft (small-building sized) in combat around a floating city. Players can use a variety of modular, improvable weapons to destroy each other, the NPC characters (+ hopefully vehicles) that populate the city, and (if time allows) any buildings an enemy may be hiding behind. Players can also collect power-ups that (usually, but not always) increase their killing efficacy. Power-ups and weapon upgrades can be picked up off the remains of NPCs or the destroyed ships of other players. Booster jets placed on the underside of the ships will allow them to scale buildings or jump temporarily off the edge of the map. When destroyed, the player will become an escape pod which has a single powerful kamikaze attack.
What are the goals of the game?
The successful player will master the ideally very simple controls and play mechanics to cause a maximal degree of in-game mayhem.
How does a player win the game? Lose the game?
The winner of a round of play (determined by a time/score limit fixed at game start) will be the player with the highest score at the end of the round. A player's score can be increased by:
1) destroying enemy ships,
2) destroying enemy escape pods, or
3) destroying NPCs.
A player loses a round of play iff he has not won the round.
What makes our game unique?
Although not wholly unique, what sets our game apart from the average first person shooter is:
1) colorful absurdity and irreverance (eg, breakdancing bobble headed manga-style schoolgirls),
2) mecha-scale. ie, player's ships are roughly the size of small buildings, and will tower over NPCs,
3) over the top weapons and weapon effects. Weapon effects will ideally be filling the screen at all times,
4) (hopefully destructible) urban environment provides cannon fodder and hide-and-seek gameplay (eg, rampage, king of the monsters, godzilla:destroy all monsters),
5) booster jets (eg, tribes) will encourage dynamic, airborn combat, and
6) NPCs will (hopefully) swarm around player characters, providing an interesting challenge and source of pyrotechnics.
The environment should also be fairly interactive, including installations and buildings that can be commandeered by player characters' escape pods.
Game Features:
--Must haves
[ ] motionless NPCs
[ ] floating cityscape (static meshes)
[ ] one powerup
[ ] one weapon
[ ] one ship model
[ ] 1st person
[ ] free for all deathmatch mode
[ ] heart pounding techno soundtrack
[ ] 4 player simultaneous
[ ] particle system
[ ] bare minimum physics ("fakey" mechanics tuned for feel)
- w/ "gravity"
[ ] keyboard/mouse control
--Would be really nice
[ ] destructable cityscape (dynamic meshes)
[ ] battle damage (decals) for ships/buildings
[ ] NPCs wandering within bounds and fighting
[ ] super-schoolgirl mode
(the player that gets the ss powerup becomes a giant schoolgirl for 30 seconds and all NPCs become super-powerful super-schoolgirls)
[ ] 3d audio
[ ] reactive (soundtrack composed by player actions) audio
(note on sound features: Joey is implementing these as part of his ICAM senior project already, so they are relatively "free"... Joey says: "they are not free.")
[ ] one escape pod (including pod mechanics)
[ ] HUD/semi-transparent parts of robot in front of view
[ ] more ships/weapons (4/many?)
[ ] more spectacular weapon effects
[ ] better physics
[ ] gamepad control
--Only if we have extra time
[ ] NPCs with AI (gta hari krishnas)
[ ] turrets installed in environment (NPC)
[ ] commandeerable buildings
[ ] breakdancing
[ ] more maps
[ ] 3rd person view in escape pod
[ ] customizable ships
[ ] battle damage (changing models)
[ ] 7 players
[ ] rear view mirror/radar/minimap
[ ] JOEY MODE (Joey makes all sound effects with his mouth)
[ ] weapon discharge on mech death
[ ] visible pilot models inside ships (eg monkey, breakdancer, christopher walken)
[ ] semi-transparent models (for powerup effects)
(note the following are crazy ryo features)
RYO:
[ ] monkey
[ ] jello cup
[ ] penguin cannon
[ ] DDR
Long-form:
Available here.
Further discussion of design issues can be found in our brainstorming thread.
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