Condors: Week Seven

Week seven update:

This week we have committed to fully pursuing our pivot in the game we’re making. Over the weekend and Monday (2/25), our designers, Julian and Sally, worked on developing a new direction for us to take our basketball-like game in. Taking inspiration from the movement mechanics that emphasized verticality in games through momentum, like Super Monkey Ball, Arkham Knight, Tiny Wings, and Tribes: Ascend, we decided to prototype a game in which players perform a diving and gliding action.

Our game idea on Monday looked like this:

  • Third Person Perspective
  • Terrain is hilly with hoops on either side
  • Players can “ski” down a hill to gain momentum and speed
  • They use this to launch themselves off of a hill and divebomb into the other team’s hoop

This idea shifted a little bit as the week progressed: the ground and launching yourself off of hills still remained, but we decided to shift more emphasis on vertical movement and the verbs “gliding” and “diving.” Thus, the current prototype we have is a four player free for all, in which players navigate an arena, racing each other to be the first to score on the specified color hoop. Video footage of this prototype can be seen below:


This prototype provides us a good platform for us to keep iterating and polishing throughout the semester, and over the course of week 8 and 9, we are planning to rework the code to allow for easy expansion and modulation of gameplay variables. (jump height, time limits, player counts, etc.)

From an art perspective, we have been developing the character look. In the above video, we can see that characters are simple ball figures that animate based on different actions they take. The projected idea for the theming of our game is a cyberpunk look (slightly heavy metal similar to Unreal Tournament/Warhammer). A first look at the character iteration can be seen below:

Character development. Courtesy of Healthy Moeung.

Moving on from this week, we will be preparing for our 1/2’s presentations – thinking a lot about how we will be exhibiting our design process thus far, as well as our plans for future development of this prototype.