Brainstorm

Hey guys, this is where I wrote up some of my ideas for where we could take this game or at least topics to talk about. Feel free to kill ideas or leave comments or suggest a better way of figuring this stuff out.

• Genre: I certainly don't want to take away from the awesome game that you have created, but I would like to specify which genre the game is in. At first the game felt like a realistic ninja stealth game, then it turned into an alien/monster fighting game. So, is it a realistic, alien, fantasy/monster, comedy, or some combo?

• Storyline: I think it would be cool to have a storyline of some type, even if it's really simple.

  • This is where we could add something more unique to this game, such as the character having a super power or special skill.

• Level ideas:

  • scroll stealing
  • poison the enemy
  • plant item
  • kill enemy
  • bonus objectives, such as not being seen, don't kill any enemies, time limit
  • mid-level challenges: key/locks, working with allies, riddles, lots of types of enemies

• User option ideas:

  • attacking, melee and distance attacks
  • poison
  • smoke bomb
  • hiding in/behind objects/holes
  • park-our?
  • impersonating enemy
  • smoke bomb
  • blow darts
  • mid-level items/skills (like those previously mentioned)
  • mid-level power-ups (temporary)
    • speed
    • invisibility
    • invulnerability

So while looking through the code I'm going to note some of the improvements to design that I have thought of.

• Make an input interface and have the controller class take and use that interface rather than using the xbox controller directly (or something similar) that way swapping in the keyboard would be really quick and dynamic detection could become a possibility.

• Take out all level specific logic from the game model and create a Level base class, this would allow us to create different and very custom levels and swap them in an out at the end of one game.

• have a class that contains constant string values used throughout the game (such as game over reasons "spotted", etc) this would prevent bugs of mistyping and allow for easy change and addition in the future.

• have individual class resets pull from the current level, that way if you fail on level 2 it will reset you to the location desired in level 2 and thus removing the necessity that you start in the same position for each level.

Ninja controls/movement options:

• Dodge roll (discussed in team meeting on Thursday)
• Flip while jumping (also discussed in team meeting)
• Strafing. I love strafing.
• Do we want the ninja to be bound with the camera when using the mouse, or separate?

General Game Ideas:

• Splash screen
• Start menu
• Options
  • Mouse sensitivity
  • Button configuration
  • Difficulty
  • Brightness