The game that I would like to design is based on a game that I designed as a kid with my brother. It’s basically  a game where you play as a green square surrounded by a maze, and you are being chased by several different enemy blocks. For the sake of simplicity, I will only be making a few levels, and will only be including one enemy block (which my brother and I would refer to as “die”blocks). you get a limited number of lives before you restart the entire game.

This is meant to be a 2D platformer game, where the player can move in 4 directions (up, down, left, right), and the enemy blocks chase the player depending on the moves they make.

In order for the player to win the level, they must reach the exit, which is represented by a yellow circle. There are no items or power-ups, hence making the game more simple. However, this is not to say that I’ll be making the levels easy. I’ll be adding a time limit so that the player will have a time constraint. I’ll provide an example for the interface below, which will nor represent any given level in the game, but will represent the main layout.

My current game idea is to have a 2D platformer game. There will be one character (a small ball) trying to exit/escape a series of  rooms to reach the outside world.

The character will have simple actions: moving in all four directions, picking up keys, grabbing bonus points (for extra scoring or time), and enter through doors. The exiting through doors will to a new level.

There will be between five to ten designed levels. They will have objects that the character can grab: keys, bonus points, doors, and walls. The walls will be limitations for the character’s movement because they will cause collisions. Sometimes they will encircle the character, but by grabbing the keys, he will be able to remove the doors.There will be enemies that will be roaming around the screen. The moment they come in contact with the character, the character will have to restart the level.

There will be a score and a timer counter. If the timer ends before the character exits the room, the character will have to restart the level as well. The score counter be kept by adding up the amount time left in each level or by the potential bonus points that will be found in each room, which a character can decide to pick or not to pick up.

P.S. I know I am not supposed to have images. But it was really simple to add the key image and the door image to the script. If it is absolutely needed, I can remove them 🙁

For my project, I hope to create a game that conveys the idea of escaping from the rat race. Too often we live deadline to deadline, oh I shall invest more time in relationships when I get that promotion and other seemingly well-intentioned statements that hold true until the next deadline or “level” inevitably strikes.

To demonstrate this idea, I will design the game as a platform-style race between the player and two other characters, represented by boxes. The background will begin as gray. The idea will be to have the box sprites moving parallel to each other at varying speeds alongside the player who is racing them. As they race, they also can collect objects (represented by ellipses) that will increase their scores and eventually levels. At times, the player will appear to be winning to create an uncertainty of outcome, but I hope to make evident that advancing levels is pointless and ceaseless. Rather, the game’s objective is one that I hope to reveal slowly. In addition to the ellipses, there will be flowers (drawn out of ellipses), but these will be in inconvenient locations where the player will have to go out of their way to collect them, to stop and smell the roses as the saying goes. With each flower collected, there is another background color added to the platform race to convey living a colorful life escaping from the rat race. I’m still trying to figure out if the game should have an “end,” such as ending when someone has reached 20 colors, etc. In short, with several rounds of playtesting, I think the outcome will come together.

Theme: Scape

This digital game will aim to recreate the daily life of a college student, trying to evade tasks and assignments at all cost. The aspect of the game will be minimalistic, as the player (the student) will be represented by a box which starting position will be the bottom right of the screen. As the game starts, the player will have to avoid being hit by falling tasks or assignments. These tasks will be appearing and falling randomly from the top of the screen. The player will have limited movement, in the sense that the game will allow him or her to move one time up and then necessarily to the sides. The player will have to reach to the top of the screen through these limited movements so it gets to the final part: ALL-NIGHTER. The player wins when it reaches the final part, and loses when hit by a task.

I’m not a 100% sure about how this will exactly pan out – but the idea right now is to make a 2d platformer game. It would involve a player escaping a dungeon before the dungeon blows up. There would be some enemies that would chase the player or try to attack the player. The objective of the player would be to dodge these enemies and make it to the safe point in the stipulated time. The layout of the dungeon would be a simple ledges system with which the player could jump around and gain or lose altitude. The safe point would ideally be somewhere on the top of the ledges system.

It could also be modelled as a game where the amount of time taken is a high-score, but I wouldn’t have the time to implement the scoring part of it. Given that collisions are pretty easy to work with, I hope I could make this game pretty easily. If it seems much harder that intended, I might switch to something simpler.

EDIT: Post feedback

I’ve made a couple of edits after Sarah’s feedback. The structure of and the procedure of the game should be much more well defined.

Ledges: These are essentially rectangles you can stand on. They will be hard-coded. I would’ve done procedural generation but there isn’t enough time.

Enemies: Each ledge can have one enemy, but it isn’t necessary. The enemy will walk on the ledge from end-to-end. Coming in contact with an enemy would either reduce a life or end the game. The enemies cannot jump, but you can jump over them to avoid them. They can be thought of as rats in a dungeon or something along those lines? It would certainly explain why they have no idea that the dungeon is going to explode, and why they are just pacing about.

Player: As the player, you are allowed to move left, right and jump. You could traverse the system of ledges by jumping from one to the other. Your objective is to reach the exit of the dungeon, which is a door of sorts – on the top level of the ledge. In my head this makes sense because bombing a dungeon would mean bombing the lowest level and dungeons are usually underground (I think).

As the player it would mean that your job is to not only figure out the best possible route to take to reach the top of the dungeon, it also means that you’d have to develop a strategy for avoiding being attacked by the enemies. Your main focus would be to escape. The enemies are obstacles that you’d have to avoid.

Theme: Escape
Name: TBD
I have not finalized my idea for the game project, but I do want the play experience to be similar to the famous Flappy Bird and Circle (by Ketchapp).  Both of these games are played for a short amount of time until the “character” dies, but one can play it over and over again to beat the high score. I want my game to have a similar collision challenge, meaning that the game is over once the “character” touches the obstacles.
In terms of graphics, I want to keep it minimalistic with pastel colors and simple shapes. The character-object will be a circle moving in a maze avoiding collision with its walls and other obstacles. I want the maze background to be constantly moving from right to left to give it an impression of a progressing race (similarly to Flappy Bird), and I want it to speed up as the game goes on. The circle will be moved with a mouse and the maze will either widen or narrow down.

Theme: Escape

Name of Game: J-Walking

This game is intended to model a real-life situation of a person j-walking across 3 lanes of cars moving at random speeds. The person intends to cross quickly and upon a collision, the person loses energy until the third collision when he/she “dies”.

In this game, the player controls a sprite that can move upwards, downwards and forward only. The player will be required to move past 3 moving obstacles on the screen without touching any of them. A certain speed is set to the movement of the player’s sprite and in the event that the player’s sprite hits any of the obstacles, the speed of the sprite reduces by a certain factor. Upon 3 collisions, the speed sets to 0 and the sprite will, therefore, be unable to move, representing “death” and hence game over.

The game will convey randomness while keeping the escape element in it. Its duration will be minimal, about a minute per game while to not bore the player every game will be generated randomly. The logic in the game will not be revealed through the documentation but it will form as a result of the gameplay experience. The graphics of the game be minimalist, consisting of small boxes and to distinguish different game elements, simply different colors will be used.

The aim of the game will be to reach a certain location while feeling chased and outnumbered. Various mazes will be generated randomly for each run to prevent player memorizing a single solution and act with it every game. This way, a different approach will have to be taken every single game to achieve the goal.

Game concept on graph paper

My game proposal, Unboxing, is a game about quick reflexes and survival. The player controls a white square in a monochrome environment. The player square is located inside concentric square boxes with one single hole in each box. Throughout the course of the game, the boxes grow smaller, and the player has to click on a direction button to escape through the hole in the current box (randomly located at either its top, bottom, left, or right) before the hole becomes too small for the player to escape. Gradually, the speed rate at which the boxes become smaller increases, and it becomes more challenging to make a good decision in time. The game ends when the box is imprisoned by a box, but it could go on forever since the boxes have random directions and the player square’s speed should match the boxes’ shrink speed.