After completing the game design document last week, we moved our sights to work on the technical design document. We split the TDD into 7 parts, each mini-game has its own document as well as the final boss battle, the hub world and both the main menu and pause menu. After discussing who should be assigned what, I ended up with the final boss battle, Mark got the Memory Match mini-game and pause menu, Sean got the Restaurant Rush mini-game, Steve got the Fire Fighter and Val got both the Hub World and Main Menu TDD.
The final boss battle needed a good description in the TDD since we made the mistake of not going into more detail on all the mini-games on our GDD. To sum it up here, the final boss fight is a twin-stick shooter where the player is trying to defeat Isarr and his hoard of minions. The player will get special attacks from his allies he has picked up along the way. I’ve added the description I wrote below if you’d like to read the slightly longer version.
Next was the Technical Challenges section. As this game is new territory for all of us, we had two very important challenges to overcome. The first is programming artificial intelligence because we will need to have two widely different implementations for this section of our game. The minions should be fairly simple follow player AI that will deal damage on collision and die. The other is Isarr who will need to not only follow the player but also move further away, chose when to shoot at the player, choose when to switch abilities and more. It will need a lot of tinkering to get him to look good and feel challenging. The second technical challenge is the core functionality of the mini-game, the gunplay. It is crucial that the shooting feel good to the player while the movement remains fluid. We will need to research what makes for good gunplay and a lot of playtests.
The ULM was next and took me the longest to complete. It consists of the main classes necessary for the boss battle to function as intended. It includes
the GameManager
SoundManager
Dialogue Manager
Player class
Powers class
Minions class
Isarr class
Finite State Machine classes
and more
To find the full list see the image below.
After the ULM I create a simple flow chart of the game flow. Our teacher, James Dupuis looked over my flow chart and commented that I was missing key features. With his help and the help from Val and Mark, we changed the flow chart to look like the one below. Only about 100% more detailed than the first one I created.
In the end, we all finished our TDD before the deadline and were able to review them all as a group and make any necessary changes. Today, we split up the work on our first prototype. I will have much more information on that front next week. See you there.
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