Introduction
Today I will be talking all about the design of our game. If you’ve come this far hopefully you’ll enjoy this in-depth talk about our game’s elements and how they interact with one another. As a game gets more elements, it become exponentially more complicated as the number of interactions increase. Even with our game that we have attempted to keep simple, we still have quite a few elements.
Elements
I’ve mentioned all the game’s elements before in the past, but I’ll re-list them here as a refresher. Our game has these elements (and possibly more in the future): Hero Cat, the title screen, the castle area, the inventory, the world map and its stages, the levels, battles and enemies, and the level of Hero Cat. Each of these elements has sub elements, such as Hero Cat’s stats or the many different types of inventory items. And of course, the user is also an element that interacts with these elements in many ways. To keep things simple and not go on and on for thousands of words, I’ll just state how these elements interact with each other.
Interactions
Hero Cat interacts with user input, inventory, and battle. The Castle Area interacts with user input and buildings with their associated menus. The inventory itself interacts with user input, equipment, and items. The World Map interacts with the stages, and slightly interacts with the Castle Area due to being accessed from there. Stages only interact with their levels, as they are kind of just holders for levels. This means they prevent player progress to the next stage until all the levels they hold are beaten. In turn, levels interact with user input and change appearance when completed or not. Finally, battles interact with user input, Hero Cat and all his associated properties, enemies, and player level. It is likely more interactions that we have not considered will appear as well. All things considered, this is a pretty low amount of interactions compared to a much more complicated game. Design documents for huge Triple A games and/or sandbox games must go on forever, with the ridiculous number of interactions they have.
Conclusion
The blog post for today was very wordy. Fortunately next time we will be debuting our next version, 0.0.2. To give a hint what will happen next time, I’ve got plans to implement the pedometer code of our game. I mean, it’s not like we can take our app around or anything yet, but this part is probably the most important part of our game. We can’t implement or test anything else with our game if we don’t have a way to keep track of the steps taken by the user. In other words, I should be able to show everyone next time what that looks like in our game (if I can get it working). I hope you will look forward too it.
