Hey guys! Welcome back to another devlog and this week I have Ryan here to talk about design and how things have changed from concept development to early prototyping. He’ll be discussing everything from designing the game and implementing our ideas into Unity and all that jazz.  (Bee Movie timestamp: 23:12 - thank me later)

The focus this week will be on all the design aspects that came to creating the game before we started actual development. We’ll be splitting the design to development devlogs into two parts to give a clearer picture of everything we’ve made so far and how a few aspects have changed during this process.

Olivia has brought me out of the sweatshop for once, the air is so fresh, tastes as good as a homemade meal, not that I get those...anyway, GAME DESIGN!

 Even though at the surface Ball to the Wall may seem quite simple, a lot of thought and design went into creating the concept, we literally have to think of everything that is in the game. Would the balls bounce or roll? Can the players intentionally hit one another off the map? Where exactly can players place obstacles? All of this was a process that was sat through and discussed with the team before being added to the ‘to-do list’. We needed to make the game feel rewarding, exciting and of course most of all, fun.

Each element needed to really impact the game, make it feel like our own. The movement was the first task but arguably most important. Still, now it’s not completely finalised, I can still see changes being made to it along the way, a really solid foundation is there though. We want each ball, e.g bowling ball, bouncy ball, marble, etc, to have its own movement attributes, each making sense to the real-life physics of the type of ball it is.

Obstacle placement was also another huge mechanic, we needed to hit the nail on the head with this. One of our team meetings turned into an entire discussion on how exactly this should work. We decided to have sectors within the map that would act as the area where players could use their collected obstacles, this will be done using a grid system, some obstacles taking up more of the grid than others. All to occur in a pre-game state.

Win states and eliminations. This took some time to conceptualise. As it is a race, obviously you want to get through the map quicker than the other players and by doing so we decided you would be rewarded more ‘points’. All players receive points for finishing the map, the number of points is based on your placement. Points can be made up in other ways though like collecting hidden objectives, shhh, you didn’t hear about that. Whoever ends up with the most points by the time the game is over is crowned victorious.

I think that’s all the very major features discussed but there is a lot of depth to the game and every mechanic and gameplay feature is decided on in a similar fashion to the ones mentioned. 

A lot still needs playtesting to be finalised to decide what will create the best player experience.

In the next devlog, we’ll be sharing with you how this design worked in practice when we started developing prototypes and a few of the challenges AND successes (we’re all about positivity here) that came with it.  

Out of context quote of the week: "Game design is hard" - Emmet, 2021.