Turning a concept into a game

We had struggled with coming up ideas for what our game would be. Our decision was what determined what we would be working on for the next 20+ weeks. It was a little overwhelming and each of us were drawing blanks, or maybe even a tad afraid of suggesting something nobody in the group really liked.

After running through a few brainstorming exercises we had settled on the idea that the player couldn't see through normal vision, and had to use a sort of sonar in order to see their surroundings. It would be visually interesting and we could come up with unique game play around it. Since our player character had unique vision, maybe they weren't necessarily human either, and that idea became the tethering/possession mechanic.

Originally, we were envisioning a game with a play style similar to Super Hot. You'd have a wave of enemies and had to possess them to direct their attacks on each other. But the programmers were having difficulty figuring out the sonar vision, a challenge that would take many weeks to implement and the whole duration of the project to polish. As one of the designers, it was up to me to develop what the game play would look like, while also making the task simpler for the programmers to implement. The action packed concept we started with just wasn't feasible given the amount of time we had and the struggles we were already encountering as a team.

Since each wave of enemies was conceived as a sort of puzzle the player would have to figure out, I made the decision to flesh out that aspect of the game instead of the action. The player would still have to use their sonar-vision to navigate, and they would still have move from target to target by possessing them. The difference now would be that, instead of armed military combatants, the enemies became passive scientists going about their experiments and incompetent security guards.

The arena style combat became exploratory challenges to complete, and the goal was no longer to defeat your enemies but to escape a laboratory that has been your prison. I set to work, writing a game play narrative that would introduce the mechanics and the new challenges to the player. That narrative evolved to become the scripted intro sequence and the first introductory level of the game.

Of course, simply reading the narrative wasn't enough to convey to the programmers what we needed the game to look like. I remember making mockups in MS Paint and 3D block out in Maya of what I conceived the first level to look like. If you play through to the end of the first level in the game, you might be able to piece together what the block out pictured above represents!

This was all fairly difficult, making these major decisions and not knowing where they would take us. But seeing everything piece together into the final product has certainly been worth it.