Game Design Project - The White Dream
- pulakeshi salunkhe
- Feb 21, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 31, 2024
This week marks the beginning of the assignment in new light, working solo on the idea that was briefed to us earlier, the theme being saving the world. In this assignment, i was tasked by myself to work and compline a comprehensive GDD as well as a working Prototype of the game.
Looking at the current state the narrative delivery is what a lot of games still experimenting making a very unique environment where game developers are testing various ideas to deliver story rather than simple dialogues and texts on the screen, using this as inspiration I'm planning to explore this in depth.
The following is the progress of the journey.
Week - 1
As the decision was made to work solo on the assignment, I had little time to waste and had to put together a presentation to showcase the concept and the possible gameplay features for the professors to assess.
The Idea was based on the theme given to us in the beginning, save the world. The game had to be a complex game with or without simple game mechanics. The idea I chose to go with was to save the world in not a physical manner but psychological one.
The game is about a boy on a journey to save himself. The game is a Narrative Action Adventure game where players can explore various maps to explore the narrative aspects of the game while playing through different dimensions. A game in which players will experience multiple abstract levels and enemies all while being on an adventure to save the boy’s whole world.
Story -
In the game, a strong-willed high school boy, scarred by childhood bullying and the loss of his parents, undertakes a courageous return to the world. This journey becomes an odyssey, blurring the boundary between reality and dreams as he befriends others facing similar trials. As he struggles to save them, the thinning border between the tangible and the ethereal world challenges the boy, fascinating him to confront his past, overcome fears, and discover self-love. The narrative weaves a curtain of resilience, friendship, and the redemptive power of facing one's deepest fears, forming the core of this adventure for if not, the boy will end up losing his entire world. In the end, the Boy realizes that the friend he’s trying to save is himself, his own world.
Week - 2
For the proposed idea, I spent this week writing and tweaking the GDD. Although not finished I managed to get the core gameplay, objectives of the game written and reviewed.
This time allowed me to focus on Narrative delivery of the game and make it enjoyable for the players. Instead of using traditional methods I chose to work on more interactive ways of storytelling. For which I compiled a presentation as an Elevator Pitch presentation and submitted it to the supervisors.
This time also allowed me to refine the narrative of the game and work in depth about the quest delivery and the prototype walkthrough.
I divided the tasks as further -
Narrative - To write down the narrative of the game and polish it. It'll be a core narrative and will consist primary objective of the protagonist and core narrative journey.
Quest system - Taking the main narrative and turning it into a comprehensive quest system for players to experience in game with level-wise objectives and rewards.
Features - Listing and tuning features of the game such as monetization, in-game interactions, Experience system and Skill tree system.
Art style - Defining a distinct art style to use for delivering the game.
Prototype - Make a working prototype showcasing most if not all of the game features possible at a technical level.
With the tasks being divided, the past week was spent in refining the core narration and initial quest of the game in order to work on the quest and later things in prototype.
the art reference for the initial process was taken from games third person perspective games such as World War Z, Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy XIV and Honkai Star Rail.
The art style was decided to be stylized and low to mid-poly in order to keep the performance of the game relatively high.
Week - 3
During this week, the progress made was drastic as the timespan was short. I did the following tasks to achieve the goal in the quickest way possible.
1. Quest system - I did research on ancient Indian literature regarding emotions (Bhaava), wrote down the quests, polished the quest and delivery as well as defined the quests too.
2. Game Design Document - I managed to put together a GDD inclusive of the features and so in order to start and progress in prototyping. GDD is yet incomplete but consists of all the bits and pieces needed for the prototyping phase.
3. Assets - For the prototype I had to create and secure assets. The assets I managed to get are not the best ones but as close as I possibly could to the art style I wanted.
4. Prototyping - I put together the base of prototype and imported the assets and characters.
Challenges of the week -
1. Quest - The research took a little longer, I had a little help of my close friend who had a lot of research done in subsequent field before me but understanding and translating all of that into a quest system for the game turned out to be a challenge. I spent good time on overcoming that.
2. GDD - Putting together the GDD wasn't much tough as I had most of the ideation done prior to the compiling.
3. Assets - Creating assets is a time consuming process especially for a game tailored for a particular style. Although I had some experience with Maxon Cinema 4D, it took some time understanding exporting importing of assets to and from the software.
4. Prototype - Character importing as well as animations, arguably the most challenging and time consuming process of the entire week.
The Animation retarget system of Unreal Engine 5.2.1 proved a challenge and really took it's sweet time making me understand it's needs.
Also, making sure all animation work smoothly and as per they should and whenever they should, I had to go back and forth in the process quite a few times.
Week - 4
This week was the final week for any changes and progress to be made. The time crunch was real and I had to finish multiple things while managing my personal life.
The tasks were simple but vast,
1. Finished Quest system and delivery - The final delivery of the quest system as well as names and quest flow was finally defined.
2. Compilation of the Game Design Document - I managed to finish the important details such as skill tree, Exp system as well as Monetization of the game. The GDD, except for the images and Audio styling, is complete. The features such as Vaulting and Stamina systems were defined as well.
3. Prototype - This week marks the implementation of the character locomotion.
The locomotion of the character needed animation blueprints to work as well as a custom player blueprint as the character was a bought asset.
Along with the basic locomotion, I implemented the Vault mechanics so that the character could jump over hurdles. Also defined certain objects to vault only, so as to make sure players don't end up abusing the feature to escape the map/level.
Then I implemented the attack system, the primary one with Combo functionality.
Along with this I built a Stat system inclusive of Health Points, Stamina Points, Exp systems as well as Skill Points and Level system. I also made a UI for the HP and Stamina.
Implement Door, Teleport as well as the trigger box dialogue delivery system.
Enemy spawn.
Challenges -
In this week, the most challenging task was to make sure the prototype functions. As the time past the debugging was becoming more and more impossible so instead of implementing experimental features, I sacrificed that in favor of tweaking implemented systems. The features such as Vault took a significant time to tune for the prototype.
Dialogue delivery, I was never able to implement a interactive dialogue system, but instead of giving up I decided to take inspiration from another game, God Of War 4 for the dialogue delivery. Instead of using interaction system I used trigger box based dialogues. Ofc it can be polished but for the prototype I feel this should do.
Enemy spawn. As it takes a good amount of blueprint knowledge I was sure it'd take a lot of time implementing comprehensive Enemy and Hit Enemy system, so instead I opted to implement an easier system. It only spawns enemies at a certain time and for certain duration while enemies have no stats.
Pending tasks for later implementation
Prototype Refinement, Tuning all the systems, Implementation of the Secondary Attack system, User Interface implementation, Loading screen, Database and inventory for the collectible, Interaction system and narration.
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