Research

So my team is going to be working on a vertical scrolling shooter, but there is one thing that we aren't quite sure about how its going to work.

So far it seams like we are going to have a lot of freedom on how the game is going to look; but then again, we are still  in the brainstorming part of the development process.

In the classroom we started to talk about shooters and looking at some videos on youtube, and we started to talk about not just having vertical scroll, but that it would also be nice to have some horizontal motion as well.

One game that I really like is called Metal Slug. I love that game, and I grew up playing it as much as I possibly could. And there is something about this game that if you just look at someone playing it, it doesn't look like there is much of a challenge because the enemies don't apear to be quick.

But once you actually start playing, you realize that while the game might seems slow, there is a lot of action in each wave of enemies that you get.

I think that it would be a great game to base our game out of, because it has a lot of action that is well thought out and there is vertical and horizontal movement in most levels (although, most of the movement is horizontal).

But one of the problems that I thought of was that if we try to do humans or humanoids for our main character & enemies, its going to take a long time to create the assets as well as trying to get a good walking cycle for each enemy. Not to mention that we would also have to create reactions to different situations for the enemies and the player. This would require way too much time, something that we just don't have.

So something else that I thought of was: why not make a space shooter?

I've already taken my Capstone course, and I have a lot of experience making spaceships because the project for my Capstone was a 3D Space Fighter game (video below). We had to make different types of ships as well, for example: fighters, heavy fighters, bombers, and I even got to create a space station as the final boss. (The space station that is in the game is not the original one that I made since it had to be modified to look like a "final boss" would).

And I've been looking at different space scrolling shooters and they all look almost the same. I mean, there is only so much you can do in a 2D scrolling shooters. The one thing that I have always liked about the scrolling shooters that I used to play back in the day was all the stuff blowing up in the screen at once. I liked how you could power up your ship to be shooting all sorts of crazy stuff and everything is just exploding around you.

We could also add some of the horizontal movement that I was talking about earlier, that way we can come up with much more intricate and fun level design.

And in the end if we do decide to go with a human for the hero of our game, we might be able to just stick to one human (the hero) to make the animation easier on us. Then the enemies would be a bunch of different machines that are trying to kill you. Something simular to Neo Contra for the PS2 just that only in two dimensions instead of three.

That's all I have for now, I'll see if I have time to make some sketches for Tuesday when we meet. Thanks for reading.