Approaching the end of our first sprint, our group came together to finish the game design document. As I said in my last blog, I was given the task of completing the level design for the final boss fight. The team agreed that the final boss fight will be a twin-stick shooter. This means I had to create a sketch of the battle arena that I had in my head as a reference for Val to create the assets we are going to use in our game. I started by sketching it on paper, as I am not an artist, the sketch is incredibly simple with not any real detail. Since Isarr (the big bad guy) lives in an airship above the island, I immediately pictured Bowser's airship in Mario, which if you didn't know, resembles a pirate ship.
After I sketched on paper I decided to make a mock-up in Gimp, a free image editor, so that I could add images and more easily change the drawing. In Gimp I spent an absurd amount of time creating the 3 very basic images below.
As you can see above, I wanted to create a level with 3 main zones the player can move through instead of one single flat zone. Using a pirate ship as the main inspiration made it easy to separate the zones. The 3 zones are named after their corresponding ship decks. From back to front we have the poop deck, the main deck and the forecastle deck. The main deck is where the enemies will spawn during the battle. The current plan is to have Isarr come out of the door in between the stairs at the beginning of combat then have his minions periodically come out of the trap door leading to the base of the ship. Next, the cannons on the side of the ship will be used during battle by Isarr. Once the first phase of the battle is over, Isarr will magically move the cannons to face inwards and fire on the player thus creating lines of cannon fire the player will have to avoid making the battle more difficult.
After the team concluded all the sections of the GDD, we still had one problem. Not a single entity was named. We spent roughly 2 hours brainstorming names for locations and characters. While Mark, Sean, Steve and myself were brainstorming, Val took Steves's hub map layout and transformed it into a wonderful piece of concept art.
Once we finally reached the end of our first sprint, we had accomplished all the tasks which were set out. The GDD was complete and now we set our sights on creating a technical design document, as well as a very basic prototype.
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