A New Project Emerges

Initial Brainstorm Doc

Initial Goals

After wrapping up Unweighted, my team held a meeting to discuss goals for our next project and brainstorm ideas to fit those goals. We decided on two major goals that would guide our brainstorming process. All of the games we had previously made were in 2D, so our first goal was to create a 3D game. This would allow us to make something substantially different than our existing experiences and would be a useful skill to have experience with. Our second goal was to have the game use networking to connect multiple players to a single session. Having made multiple games in Godot, we decided to continue with the engine for this project to ease the amount of research the group would have to do outside of the desired goals.

With our goals for the project outlined, we brainstormed a number of different game concepts. The concept that we decided to move forward with was our idea for a first person arena shooter. Two teams of two compete to be the last team standing in the constricted arena. The catch is that each player has only one bullet, which would result in a constant sense of stakes in each interaction. Each player would have access to a melee attack so they aren't powerless without their one bullet, but the range disadvantage would swing the favor greatly toward the opponent on a missed shot. Additionally, we wanted to keep rounds quick, so a system that forces the players together is planned to be implemented. With our initial design settled on, we moved on to develop the base functionality of the game to figure out the basics of our technical implementation and see how fun the game is.

Gameplay Test Session - 2023/01/05

Initial Development

Over the first two weeks of development, I created the initial test arena, developed the player (re)spawn system, gave the player their gun, gave the player the ability to be shot by someone else's gun, and implemented the core game loop system of timed rounds that start and end from the lobby. As a team, we have created a test arena, implemented multiplayer combat and target syncing, and developed the surrounding game architecture of menus and lobbies.

To test out gunplay and network syncing, we implemented targets placed around the arena that would disappear when shot, both for the player that shot it, and all connected players. These targets ended up leading to a secondary game mode in which all players had a limited time to shoot as many targets as possible while shooting the other players to force them to wait through a respawn period before being to rejoin the action.

Updated Design Doc Overview

What's Next

With our first set of internal testing done, we held a meeting to discuss our long term plan for the game, as well as the steps to take to get it there. We decided that this was a long term project with a end goal of being a polished product, made available for free on Itch.io.

During the discussion preceding our cementing of a long term plan, I came up with the idea of making our guns into bows, still with just one arrow each, but allowing for a much higher level of strategy with being able to retrieve loose arrows, both from your partner and your opponents. We decided that we would implement the change since it added a lot of unique gameplay decisions and would differentiate our project from most modern arena shooters further than it was already aiming to. With that addition made, we made a mostly comprehensive listing of the systems, models, and effects we would need to add to have a finished product.

From here, we'll be going back to work on implementing this list. Once we've made it through a large chunk, we'll revisit this discussion to clean up what still needs to be added. And hopefully come up with a name.