Review of My Game "Yoyalma"

[This post was done to be taken as Homework 8 for the FSU Video Game Design class]

1) The Tetrad

Story

The story is about an Indian from America that is struggling in his village because the main cities where sending troops to take prisoners for sacrifice and indoctrinate everyone. He decides that he wants to escape and so he gets together with other members of the tribe to build a raft and escape. The scape goes without any troubles but soon everything turns grim as a storm swallows the refugees. You wake up stranded in an island as the last survivor. Your whole family is gone and everything is behind. You follow your instincts and try to survive but you soon learn that there is something inside the heart of the mountains. Writings on the wall tell the story of creation, the story of the god’s jealousy and anger, but also about their kindness and selflessness. Your will to survive and your curiosity move you forward, to uncover whatever lies beyond.

Technology

We are using Unreal Engine 4.9 to make the game, Blender to manipulate game assets and Audacity to create game sounds. Our game is meant to run on PC and is meant to be played with mouse and keyboard.

Art

The art is simplistic, trying to resemble the art from Mesoamerican Indians. Nobody in my team is an artist, so we are having a tough time doing that aspect of the game.

Gameplay

The game is meant to be a mixture between a survival game and an adventure game. There are some elements of survival mainly that you have an energy resource that gets depleted with your actions and replenished by consuming food. There are also elements of an adventure game in the sense that you have to explore the island to move forward in the game. There are obstacles that don’t let you proceed and you have to find ways to overcome those obstacles by using items in the game. The combat is very simple, the enemies will do two types of attacks: auto attacks that go off on a certain interval and that activate when the player is in range and special attacks that go off on a marked are that the player has to move out from.

2) Balance

We have to balance the damage that all of the monsters and weapons do. We also have to balance the challenges in the game so that they scale well level by level. Another thing about balance that we need to keep in mind is that we have to distribute the “moments” in our game evenly. We can’t concentrate all of the content in one single level.

3) Emergent properties

There isn’t any customization of the character in the game so there won’t be anything about the character that the player can tweak it in any way. There is a possibility of emergent uses of the items that we place in the game, or ways to progress faster than we usually expected. But that is unlikely, since we don’t have many elements in the game there isn’t much the player can get away with.

4) Interest curves

The game starts with a basic tutorial moment. The player will hear the main character say that they need food to survive, the player will be standing in front of a crab and a message will tell the player to press the left mouse button to attack. This will get the player to kill the crab and get meat which he will use to survive. The next moments consists on a bunch of encounters with crabs and the first instruction to the power inside the mountain as a scream and a red screen. To complete the first level the player must get to a cave and retrieve the fungus so that he can cure the poison from the plants in the forest ahead.

We are aiming to peak the players interest at the moment of the scream. We are hoping that this will make the player interested in what is going on in the island. Then we are also hoping that the player will try to venture forward into the forest, to find that there are poisonous plants inside the forest. Then they will fall back and look around for clues and eventually find the fungus. We hope that the player feels engaged as he discovers this and feels the need to move forward.

The jungle will go on for a little while with just sound effects and trees. After a couple of seconds of walking the player will hear a roaring noise. If he goes further he will be attacked by pumas. This enemies will be particularly strong.

To proceed to the next part of the mountain the player will have to move a couple of big rocks. The last boss will be a god that is raging inside the mountain. The player will only have to dodge the attacks of the god until he eventually runs out of fury.

5) Explain the reasons you like or dislike the game and relate this to Game Design issues. 

I’m going to talk about the issues that I found in our process of design, since the game is not don’t I don’t have much to say in these category so I think elaborating in our issues on the process of making the game will be more worth it. I think that the main problem we had as a group is that we got too caught up thinking about what “type” of game we were going to create and which general “mechanics” we were going to have in our game instead of focusing on exactly the game we were going to create. We went on and on about the story and the general theme that we were going for, but we never sat down and actually try to go and create a level from start to finish in our heads. I think this was primarily because we had never worked on a videogame before and so we got caught up on all of the terminology and we painted the pictures with strokes that were just too broad for us to execute at the end. If we had just sat down and actually try to create, in our heads, how this videogame would have played out we would have been way better off. We are struggling to try to finish what we set up to do and I think that we had learned a lot though out this process. This has been a great learning experience that has given me an opportunity to really dedicate time to these passion of mine, with a real team of people that are as passionate as I am. The knowledge that I’ve gained will surely make my next game a way easier task.