Exercises

6.7: Describe Your Game

Doctor Vs Plague idea: Black Death Britain era AR game for Android where you play as a Plague Doctor in charge of defending a settlement from rats and diseased victims. The game can be set up on a flat surface facing a wall to begin the game. Here the settlement can be simulated on the table and the wall can be the backdrop which spawns the enemies (such as a sewer opening or broken wall leading to a sewer). From a First Person Perspective, the player can fire medicine at the diseased victims or rat poison at the rats to either cure or kill, respectively. To do this players will have to rotate their phones to aim at approaching enemies and fire using the aim cursor at the center of their screens. Enemies who reach the settlement will begin to infect it, increasing the infection meter below the settlement. Once this fills up the player loses the game. Enemies will be coming in waves, meaning once all enemies are eliminated, the wave is cleared, moving onto the next wave. Go ahead and cure ‘em all!

6.8: Write a Treatment

Title: Doctor Vs Plague

Game Concept/Outline:

The game is played through the eyes of one of the many Plague Doctors in Britain during the years of the Black Death, an era where the Bubonic Plague ran rampant by means of diseased carriers. Rats where key carriers of the disease and their massive numbers are what is spreading the disease so quickly. As a doctor, the goal of the game is to eradicate these carriers and successfully treat infected victims while also cordoning off unaffected settlements. 

Characters:

Plague Doctor- The main character who the player is controlling. The plague doctor has two types of weapons at his disposal to either treat or kill infected patients and rats respectively. These weapons include rat poison for the rats and medicine for the infected. It is the plague doctor’s duty to defend the settlement he is tasked with from infection.

Rats- Rats make up the main antagonists of the game in that they are what spread the infection more quickly. When they enter uninfected territory they are able to infect it twice as fast as infected victims can. Rats also appear in swarms and move faster than plague victims, making them more of a higher priority target.

Infected Victims- Slow and shambling, these diseased bodies slowly make their way towards the settlement, seeking shelter. However, if they arrive to the settlement they will spread the disease further and infect the settlement. Plague victims are harder to take down than rats due to their bigger frames and the fact that the cure takes longer to work in comparison to killing rats with rat poison.

The game will also feature upgraded variations on the rats and victims in order to make the game harder in later stages.

Beginning Event- Setting up the Settlement:

The settlement that the plague doctor is tasked with defending first needs to be built on a flat surface facing a wall. This allows the plague doctor to view all directions easily and identify possible attack pathways. Once a surface is decided upon for the settlement, the building process will begin which takes a few seconds for the settlement to be established

First Wave Attack:

A countdown of 5 seconds will begin once the settlement is built to signal the coming of the first wave of enemies. Here the wall in front of the settlement (which in the player’s view will be a broken wall revealing a sewer room within) will begin to spawn rats and plague victims which will close in on the settlement. The doctor must now begin firing his medicine and rat poison bottles at the advancing enemies. Firing rat poison at the plague victims will kill them, leading to the doctor’s popularity dropping. This means that for future enemy waves the infection meter will begin with less capacity, meaning the settlement will be infected faster. Once all enemies are successfully destroyed the wave will be cleared, leading to a brief period of 5-10 seconds until the next wave.

Second Wave Attack:

In this wave, additional enemies will begin to attack the settlement from an additional direction to the left of where the main wave of enemies is spawning. Rats will have an increase in speed also. Other than these changes the game will progress in much the same way as Wave 1.

Third Wave Attack:

Here, rats will begin attacking in swarms of 4-6 rats, forcing the player to take care of them immediately once they spawn due to the danger of being overrun too fast. Furthermore, in this level a new enemy will be introduced: a child plague victim. The child enemies will have the ability to run, making them as fast as the rats but with higher health. The child enemies will spawn one at a time in between small periods of time, such as 30 seconds or a minute. Wave will again end in the same way.

Fourth Wave Attack:

Wave 4 will feature the same enemies and speeds as Wave 3. However, a new direction of attack will be included here to the right of the main attack direction. As such, the doctor will have to defend the settlement from three possible attack directions. Furthermore, here the adult plague victims will have a new ability. This ability allows the victims to spit projectile vomit over the settlement. This vomit contains worms which will wiggle towards the settlement slowly en masse. The doctor will have to throw his medicine projectile at the vomit worms in order to quickly eliminate them. The vomit will always land over and behind the settlement, so its direction will be fixed. 

Fifth Wave Attack:

Wave 5 will be the last wave that the plague doctor has to deal with and will feature all of the elements discussed in previous Waves. Here, though, rats will be even faster than before while the plague victims will have higher health and will resemble obese shambling bodies that can infect the settlement as fast as the rats if they reach it. The settlement will again be attacked from all three directions with the addition of enemies sporadically appearing in between these directions as well, meaning the doctor will have to defend against a full semi-circle assault. Once all enemies have been wiped out the wave will be completed signalling the first ending that can be achieved in the game.

Bonus Challenge:

Once Wave 5 is complete, the sewer area will start spewing a thick fog that makes penetrating it very difficult. The doctor will have to now fight a giant rat which will act as the final optional boss for the game. This giant rat will be lurking behind the fog and will burst out of the fog in front of the settlement to spew out rat swarms that will rush to the settlement. The doctor will then have to attack the rat king as much as he can before moving back to the rat swarms to destroy them. The rat king will appear out of the fog from random directions to reduce predictability, while the duration that it will be out of the fog will also be randomized. If the rat king is still alive after a certain time, (perhaps 1 minute) it will rush closer to the settlement every time it comes out of the fog, reducing the safe distance between itself and the settlement. Once the rat king is successfully killed, this will signal the end of the game and the true ending of the game.

Additional Elements:

Upgraded Rat Poison- During Wave 3, a single golden rat will appear at random which will simply run around for a few moments before vanishing back in the sewer. This rat will not be aggressive nor will it advance towards the settlement. If the doctor notices and kills this rat fast enough, then he will receive an upgrade to his rat poison, which will allow him to throw a larger bottle which can damage and kill entire swarms of rats.

Upgraded Cure- Also in Wave 3, a single golden child plague victim child will appear for a few seconds and run around the sewer before vanishing. If the doctor manages to kill this enemy before it disappears then he will acquire an upgraded cure weapon. This upgrade will allow the doctor to throw two medicine bottles at once which can target two different enemies near each other, thus damaging more than one enemy. 

7.8: Diagramming Core Gameplay 2

Game Focus Exercise

In order to maintain a bare bones experience for my game while still keeping the core principle, plenty of aspects can be removed from it. The biggest of these would be the fact that the character you are playing is an exorcist/ghost hunter and that they are hunting ghosts. The game can still have its fundamental gameplay be based around the players themselves hunting down objects in an interesting environment. The environment itself however cannot be removed (this being a large cemetery with intricate landscape to approach and cross) since it is what sets the atmosphere of the game and what can heighten the experience of the game substantially. Furthermore, the variety and rarity of creatures to hunt also needs to be maintained, as well as the ability to note that they are different. This is in order to create a lively and organic change in emotions in the player, ranging from excitement to expectation, and not have their mood flatline to simply looking for the same thing constantly in a numb haze. Lastly, the prospect of getting more powerful and having stronger attacks/abilities can also be removed, since the essence of the game really is to track creatures down, note them and move on.

User Testing Exercise

The most effective testing practice that works for my projects is by having the tester sit down and begin playing the game with only an introduction to what the game itself is. The tester should receive no other information other than the type of game they are playing; no goals or mechanics should be described at this phase. Once the tester goes to the menu of the game, they should be able to see the Help/Controls menu in order to see the basic functionality of the game. If this does not exist then have the tester play around with the controls themselves until they figure it out. If they are having trouble simply let them know what the basic controls are. At this point, let them play around for a couple of minutes and note down what areas they are going to and ,more generally, what they are actively doing in the game. After this, if they are not yet vocal about the game and what they are doing, start asking them questions about the game itself. These can include: ‘What do you think the objective of the game is’, ‘What do you think of the atmosphere/concept of the game’, ‘Why are you performing the action you are performing’, ‘Where do you think this game will take you in the next few minutes’. 
As they are playing and commenting, note down their responses to the questions but also their general reactions. This is because at this point, with your questioning prompt, they should be more vocal about what they are doing in the game. Also, more direct and precise questioning should follow, such as how they feel about a certain mechanic or what changes would make the game feel better to play. It is also important to have previously noted their reactions, such as confusion or bewilderment, while playing the game in order to ask them about those reactions at this stage. Indeed, once you ask the more specific questions related to technicalities as well as more major changes in the game, you can now ask what caused the testers to feel the way they did when they did while also asking what they wanted to feel or expected to feel if they were dissatisfied or confused. 
Once the playtest ends and you thank the user for testing the game, take time to organize the hierarchy of the responses and answers you received for your questions about the game. In fact, list the major and more serious questions and responses at the top as red flags and the rest of the responses below. Combine user reactions with the more serious questions you received answers for if the reactions were applicable to these. Also note down on a different list the positive outcomes of the playtest which can include things that worked well, reactions you expected and wanted to see as well as any other positive comments or suggestions. This is in order to not lose sight of what actually works well with the game at this point.

10.1: Testing for Functionality

In this exercise I attempted to use the paper prototype for the AR Ghost Hunt game I am currently producing with my group. I initially thought that the paper prototype was simple enough to understand in that the locations where marked very clearly and all you had to do was move the paper cut out with the ‘health and power’ bars over the X and then a cutout of a ghost would appear where the X is. Up until the point where the player spots the X and the cutout of the ghost appears all worked well enough with no intervention. However, after this I noticed that the prototype lacked clear visuals on how the interaction with the ghost is meant to play out; how is the player meant to attack the ghost and how is the ghost meant to respond and fight back where both ambiguous. As such, I needed to create visual representations of the attacks and how these would work in game and help play testers visualize these. After this, I let the play testers figure out on their own how the fight system would work and I saw that they played it out in more of a turn based system with the ghost attacking first and the hunter responding by fighting back. They also played around with the power and health bar every time an attack occurred which was satisfying to watch. For the majority of the aforementioned parts of the game, the testers now largely understood how the game is supposed to work and could effectively visualize it, largely due to its simplicity and resemblance akin to the Pokemon series, which the testers were familiar with. Nevertheless, overall the prototype lacked the later stage of the game which involved either exorcising or setting the ghost free and as such could not be played out. This was because me and my group have yet to develop how that would work in the game.