Commencement of my game design journey at Kingston

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23rd January 2024 marked towards my first step into the world of game design at Kingston University. I was allotted to a team by Prof. Vasilis Argyriou. We are a team of 5 people. 2 programmers and 3 designers. I have volunteered to help the programmers by writing C# codes with them because of my prior experience in programming. We brainstormed on a lot of great ideas and ended up shortlisting one of them.

About the game

We are working on an idea that involves 2 teams fighting each other to meet their objectives. The game is a tactical shooter with a sci fi paranormal twist. Team one is called the Dark Realm team (DR) and their objective is to kill the enemy team, or keep the enemies engaged long enough for the timer to run out. The Light Realm team's (LR) winning condition is to collect all the machine parts before the timer runs out and escape this horror reality.

I generated this image using AI to present a picture in front of my group about how the game setting could be. The presentation was about convincing them to set the game up in a dungeon where space time bends itself resulting in inter - realm or time travel. The players can switch realms and are only powerful in their own realms. The LR players will have to collect machine parts from the DR and fix their machine, but the DR players can travel to the LR and sabotage their plans of fixing it. Wang has been coming up with some great ideas and Molly is doing an amazing job at creating playable mock ups. I am currently working on the game economies and the spawn concepts. We are yet to decide the preferred art style.

Design Process

Throughout the design process we are going to use multiple software listed below-

Miro

Miro is a popular online collaborative whiteboard platform that allows users to visualize, collaborate, and brainstorm ideas in real-time. It's widely used by teams for various purposes such as project planning, design thinking, agile workflows, user story mapping, mind mapping, and more.

We will be using it for the following-

1. Brainstorming and collecting our ideas.

2. Assigning tasks to individual team members.

3. Creating test plans and test cases.

4. Logging bugs and working on them.

Unity

Unity is a powerful and widely used game engine that is utilized for the development of video games, simulations, and various interactive experiences across multiple platforms.

Our game is based on Unity and the whole development process will take place in this engine. We are planning to do the following in Unity-

1. Programming the game.

2. Creating the maps.

3. Importing the assets and animations to be used in the game.

4. Creating visual effects for the game.

5. Conducting tests.

6. Adding audio effects and background music.

7. Creating a functioning economy for the game.

8. Polishing the final game.

Arcweave

Arcweave is a collaborative tool designed for creating interactive diagrams, prototypes, and documentation for game design and narrative design projects. It allows game developers, designers, and writers to visually map out their game's story, mechanics, and systems in a user-friendly interface.

We're planning to use Arcweave to create a pipeline of how the game will work and how the economies will function. The game's winning and losing conditions are also visualized in our Arcweave project.

Articy

Articy is a specialized software tool designed specifically for game development, particularly for managing and organizing game design documents, narrative scripts, and interactive dialogue systems.

We'll use Articy as a database to create lore for the game including character backstories and the plot of the game in order to keep the user interested in the story of the game along with it's multiplayer aspect.