Game- System Designer
Brief: A survival game where the player must survive on an island while collecting resources and teching up to be able to escape.
Role: Gameplay Design, System Design, Visual Scripting
Team Size: 6 (3 designers and 3 artists)
Date: 2021-06
Period: 4 weeks
The Project
Problems:
Birds are everywhere.
It is very hard to make a non open world game with a free flying player character.
Theme
The themes for the project were to make a survival game with a non-humanoid animal as the player character and the animal should find themselves in a setting they are not native to, we were given an avian animal.
After brainstorming and discussions we landed on a game about a penguin stranded on a tropical island, wherein the penguin must use what they can to survive and escape the island.
I have worked with the game loop.
The flying, collection, inventory, crafting, and resource management. Both as designer and implementer.
Crafting
Collect resources strewn about the island.
Using the crafting menu the resources can be consumed to craft.
The finished products will be found at the bottom of your inventory.
The crafting and resources gathering is simple and basic, the UI overlay might even be a bit to simple which makes it slightly less user friendly once you know what to do.
Flying
Flying had a big decision to be solved:
Go for a simple- easy to control and unimmersive design
or
Make a flying controller that tries to emulate how birds fly, which will be a lot harder to control.
We decided to make the flying emulate birds. Birds generally cannot fly backwards and rotate to turn.
The game is overall very simple and to reach all the only flying content you can use very straight flying to reach it if the flying is to hard, but for someone who wishes to challenge themselves the flying controller gives room for acquiring mastery.
Flying connects to 2 resources, Stamina and Durability.
While flying you expend stamina, and will be forced into ground state if you run out of stamina.
While flying the the wings will lose durability overtime.
Both of these will drain quickly with low tier wings and very slowly with high tier wings.
Survival
A standard feature in survival games is a food resource to manage.
The way we have implemented it into our game is to connect it with: pick ups, health and stamina.
At high food level the player will be regenerating health overtime on top of getting a flat amount when consuming food in addition to raising the food level.
If the penguin is starving it will start to slowly lose health meaning you can lose to starvation.
Stamina regenerates slower the lower food level you have.
