As both a designer and a player of games i have always been infatuated with the 3D Platformer genre. Designing movement mechanics that feel natural and a environment to test the mastery of those controls is a challenge that I have wanted to tackle for awhile. So going into the semester I was eager to work on a 3D Platformer and my team seemed open to the idea. However the challenge then became how to make it unique and interesting?
I looked at the genre and tried to determine what would help to push it forward in a meaningful way. What I found is that 3D Platformers were one of the few genres that had yet to break into the competitive e sports scene. I to make a game that would appeal to this genre. After a good bit of design work I came up with a concept where two player's would race though a environment attempting to collect a certain amount of objects before the other did. However after presenting this idea to my team I found that it has some major design flaws. First of a race though a environment could lead to optimal strategy for navigation being created which would cause the game play to lose variety. Secondly since their was no direct conflict their was even less variety of gameplay and less of a sense of competition.
Taking all of this feed back into account I decided to pivot the concept to more direct one vs one competition. This new concept was a 3D platform fighter that focused on positioning over pixel perfect precision. To do this we introduced a dash mechanic where players could move up down or forward rapidly, damaging other players they hit.
However what really mad the game unique was the cheese system. Unlike other games that had a standard health bar players started with a set amount of cheese. Players would droop this cheese when they are damaged and it could them be collected by either player. It is each player's goal to reduce their opponents amount of cheese to zero. This was put in place to force players to navigate around the environment while being aware to their position to the other player.
Upon presenting this idea to my team they were excited about it and we agreed to make this our third and final prototype for the semester. However we still needed a context to set the game in. After a fair bit of discussion we decided to have it set in the sewer and have the fighting be between mutated rats. We had finally turned a mechanical concept into a game concept. We named our monstrosity Seize the Cheeze.
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