Bengt-Erik Ingvaldsson
"Rookie of the year Game development" application
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Summary:
Game Pitch: |
Creative survival game on planet environment. Solve problems by designing machines. Use your real life geological knowledge to search and gather resources to build machines / base /ships in a multiplayer PvE/PvP game. |
Genre: |
Creative multiplayer survival. |
Target audience:Target audience: |
All agesMultiplayer, One small island to test game mechanics. |
Game play:
Objectives:Game progression: |
Gather resources to build machines / bases / ships to gather more resources.Slowly gather resources to build more effective machines to gather more resources. |
Game Vision:
- Make a game where players are creative and experiment with creative solutions on problems.
- Multiplayer PvE and PvP.
- Explore how to make the resource gathering a fun and educational part of the game.
- Make GEO engineers a game with future technology AND future mindset around mining and resource management.
Tools used:
Unity.
Maya.
Substance painter.
Adobe Fuse.
Mixamo.
Photoshop.
Adobe Aftereffect.
Adobe Premier pro.
Photoshop.
GitHub.
Reference games:
The survival and building mechanics from Space Engineeres.
VS.
The environment impacts of expanding in Factorio.
Design pillars:
- Making resource collecting fun.
Using voxels to make world dynamic and diggable. Looking for treasures in the ground are always fun. Connecting real geological knowledge to where to find ore. Taking away the guessing game of random digging to find ore. I also want to avoid "ore detector" to instead let player research and get real "knowledge" of where to find ore.
- Creative Building.
Try to make player take important and deciding desertions on how to prevail in game. Use a Tier system. You start by building a Fire Place and then a Furnace and then a Refinery. But if you know a good starting spot you may go directly to Furnace. Make player solve problems by using their creativity to build magnificent machinery's.
- Sustainable balance between expanding industry and environmental impact.
If you cut down all the trees in the wood. The wood will not grow back.
Making resource collecting fun
One of the ways to make resource collecting fun are to make the ground diggable. I used "Voxeland" voxel-engine because I like that I could use "nodes" to generate the voxel terrain. This made it possible to use things like Hightmaps I made in GAIA(another Unity module).
Node system I made to generate the terrain.
The layers to generate the terrain.
Started with a "Rock bottom" layer created from a random noise node.
Covered that with a "Gravel" layer.
First ore layer. Magnesium, Used to make guns and so on in the game . This is the rarest ore in the game so it is hidden deep underground.
Copper layer. Used to craft electric things in the game. Berried quite deep as in real life (Player real life geological skills come in handy).
Iron ore. Used for almost all crafting in the game. Tall Pillars or "veins" of ore that in some places are connected to make player follow them to find more ore liken real life. They go all the way up to the surface to be easy to find.
Top Rock layer that the Iron ore can penetrate to make it easier to find iron ore without special tools.
Voxeland allowed to add "empty" voxels to the terrain. This made perfect caves and cave-systems for the player to explore and also made it easier to get down through the layers for the player to find deeper ore without digging too much.
Shore stone layer (Purely for looks).
Grass and trees.
Sand and rocks.
River bed.
And finally water and the river.
Creative Building.
Placeholders for the different tiers. Player can refine all Ore in all tiers but next tier adds a significant speed and yield bonus. This makes the player take big and important decisions that impact the game on what to build/use there resources on. In my experience this is the kind of things that makes a game fun and the "replay ability" high.
Sustainable balance between expanding industry and environmental impact.
Eatch tree have a area of influence where they "feel" if some other tree are present.
If player cut down the tree. The tree will "regrow" if there are other trees in the area of influence. This to simulate polynation and so on from other trees.
But if player get greedy and cut down all trees in that trees Area of influence. The tree will not regrow because the "other trees" are outside the area of influence. This makes the player think about balancing resources input and output. Player need to use sustainability and think about tomorrow when using tomorrow’s technology. I feel this is missing in most Sci-Fi games today. With this simple mechanic I try to make player think ahead and think sustainability and just not "harvest as much as possible in the shortest time possible". I think this are a fun mechanics that challenge the player and sneaks in a little real life environmental thoughts in the players mind.