Today I want to give you some insight in designing my King Crab Catching mini game. I created that game to reherse my unity programming skills with C#. Ofcourse, before I could start programming or doing some art for it, I needed to have a clear design of the thing I was going to create.
The game is still in development at the moment of writing, but here's a movie of what I have so far:
I started out with 2 "requirements":
- It was going to be an endless scroller type of game
- It had to be procedurally generated
So I started looking at existing games to take as a starting point. The first game I came across was Rayman on tablets/phones. This was already to complex as a starting point, but gave me some ideas, like collecting coins and having to jump from platform to platform.
The following game I came across was an old arcade game for mobile phones (not smartphones in that era). The game where you are a helicopter and you have to push the up-arrow to go up and then it automatically falls back down with gravity. And you have to fly through a level filled with deadly obstacles. If you hit a obstacle like a meteor or a floating rock you die. This game was a good starting point to start designing. So I started brainstorming for more features to add in, and to give it a new setting, cause helicopters are boring.
The brainstorming for a new setting made me come up with:
- A level where you have to jump from platform to platform (like rayman)
- If you miss a platform you will fall in water and die.
- There will be Crabs on the platforms.
The Following brainstorm was about new features and the goal of the game:
- The goal is to keep going as long as possible to collect score points.
- There will be rock abstacles you have to jump over.
- There will be coins to collect to increase score
- You have 5 health points (hearts)
- Hitting an obstacle makes you loose 2 health points
- What to do with Crabs?
Then I had enough to work with and started programming in unity. I started from the platformer tutorial I believe, which already provided me with character art and a character controller to run around and jump. After I had the basic features implemented I started going back to the brainstorming board. Things I noticed during the current gameplay were:
- The rocks spawn to often, so I either have to make them spawn less, or provide a way to destroy them.
- If you try to collect all coins you will die soon because when you jump to collect coins you will likely end up between 2 platforms.
So the following brainstorm session made me come up with the following:
- Player can shoot to destroy rocks
- Player can shoot nets to catch crabs which will increase your score
- If you hit a crab, you will loose 1 Health point
- You can collect hearts to increase your health points by 1 (every 20-30 seconds a heart will spawn)
And that's how I ended up with the final design of the game.
Currently the game is still in development, but all I have left to do is implement the health points system.
Hope this gave you some great insight in my design method for a small game!
Peace
Stefan "Stellar" Geerinckx
