1. Game Proposal
This is an arcade survival game, in which the player’s goal is to dodge entities and survive until a certain time is reached, and then be able to pass onto the next level. (The game is similar in some ways to Pacman, in that the player progresses through levels by running away from/dodging harmful entities.) The player can survive by moving with the arrow keys to dodge entities/negative effects and running into powerups or activating them with keystrokes. Entities will appear from multiple parts of the screen and will bounce inside of the play area as well. The entities will have different behaviors (tracking, bouncing, shooting). There will be physical obstacles that are placed randomly for each level and there will be randomly placed speed up or slow down pads that the player can move over to change their own speed.
You begin at the title screen which has option to play a new game, resume an old game, view an ‘about’ screen and ‘help’ screen, and a cosmetic shop. Our game’s objective is to stay alive as long as possible inside of a rectangular-shaped playing field. Your character is small object which you can move around with the arrow keys. While you are playing different entities will have behaviors such as tracking the player, moving in predesignated patterns, and bouncing around off obstacles and walls. There will be multiple levels where the enemies and obstacles of each gets harder as you progress. Difficulty increase means the speed of the obstacles goes up. For every time you were hit, tracked, or bump by one of entities, your health bar will be reduced by a certain amount. The game ends when the player lost all of their health.
For scoring the main way of earning coins(points) would be based on the amount of time you survive. There will extra pickups and such to give bonus coins as well. The highest amount of coins earned per player for one play session(round) will be used on the high score list. Total coins come from each player getting their last play session’s total added to their current play session. Coins may be used to purchase skins in the skin shops.
For each level there will be a basic type of enemy that appears on the screen at the start of the level. As that level progresses there will be new types of enemies that appear. New levels mean new obstacles and more/different enemies. Upon passing a level (lasting a certain amount of time), move to the ‘exit’ to next level. The exit will have a visual indication.
For this project we will be designing on a windows 10 OS and using Java and JavaFX
90-level:
- Title screen – new game (reset total score), load game (load game with name to get total score back), about (credits), options (game controls, difficulty), info (total score, player currently loaded, high scores)
- About screen
- Scoring – Players will log in as their name. Every player will have their own number of coins. The players score per game will be totaled and added to the coins. High scores will display the highest scores per game, while the coins will be used in the shop for cosmetics and progression.
- Difficulty - speed enemies up, less priority on spawning good powerups on higher difficulty
- Sound effects - on being hit or touching a power up or negative effect
- Cheat mode - invincibility in order to test surviving through levels
- Help screen - same as options mentioned above (will be named options)
- Save/Load - save/load the current game status
- Levels - Levels will be distinguished by having more/different types of entities chasing you and more/different obstacles
- Level Designer - separate GUI application that allows player to design its own map layout
- Profiles for saving and loading
100-level:
- Health powerups - gain health back
- Temporary invincibility powerups - don’t take damage for a certain time
- Freeze/slow entities powerups – freezes or slows enemies allowing player to move somewhere else
- Panels on play area that either speed up or slow down the player
- Different kinds of projectiles/enemies - faster, slower, bouncing, tracking, spinning in circles, laser (visible charge up (gets brighter). Blast that instantly does damage across an x or y axis)
- Optional 2 player mode
Bonus–level:
- Optional survive-as-long-as-possible mode
- Synced background elements with music - (ex. Flashing background to music)
- Final Boss (shoots out other enemies)
- Player skin shop - cosmetics (player color/design). A player’s coins are used to buy cosmetics in the shop located in main menu.
- Easter eggs