Week 9A Game Design Reflection

Sadly, I missed the presentation for this lab because I was throwing up but.... I can talk about actually designing the video game. I was in the group for the video game, High Life. I really enjoyed working with my group; we were all really understanding of each other's creative ideas and were willing to be flexible and listen to others suggestions. I thought our overall product was very convincing and good. I also liked how we all met and did all the work together. No one worked on the project separately so it made the entire thing feel like a real group effort. Usually, in these group projects, I always feel like one person is working harder than someone else and I get paranoid that that person isn't me so I try to help as much as possible, but this time around I felt the work was divvied up as evenly as possible.

The goal for our game was to reach the top dog status, or to deal coke. Our boy wanted to get out of the ghetto and work his way to the highest ranking and to do that, you have to avoid cops and work your way through various other drugs.

The mechanics for the game were as simple as possible. WASD for the camera, point and click for any action, and escape for the menu options. We wanted to keep it as simple as possible because our original idea was to make the game like Lemonade Stand. After planning for a bit, we realized that that might be a little tooooo simple, so we threw in the point and click action options to make the game more like the Sims and less like a simple Flash animation.

Objectives are the small advances you make within a game, such as making $1,000 so you can sell pills. It is not the overall goal, just little steps you take in the game, little objectives. A good one would be to sell all your weed in one day or to double your profit in three days. Objectives can be set by the game designers but in our game, you basically can go about the bigger goal anyway you want.

The rules for the game are simple. You must avoid the cops. That's number one. If you get caught, you first get a warning, then your stash gets taken away, and then you get a fine. If you run out of money or drugs, you must return to the ghetto. You can only sell what you can buy, so players must beware and play the game with a sense of strategy. The other rules are about moving on to the next level of drugs. The levels go marijuana, hallucinogenics, pills, and then finally coke.

That's basically the entire game. Like I said, working on this project was a lot of fun because my group worked so well together. I would say the only issue we had was deciding how complicated to make the workings; if it should have more levels, more obstacles. We decided to keep it simple enough because that's where our inspiration came.