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Game Design Project : Entry 1- Ideation

 

Ideation - Genre Definition, Inspirations and Core Premise

As a Game Designer I always took notes of good game mechanics from every game I played and additional notes on how I would improve/alter it. One of the fun little things I frequently did was taking concepts from one genre of game and trying to apply and implement it in a different one to see if it would work and analyse why this mechanic works in this game but not in the other.

So all of my game design notes were an assortment of ideas and concepts for a wide range of different genres of games and till now I have not sat down and designed a game from beginning to end, even though I have a few good ones that I have started from scratch I really didn't try to expand it and design a complete game with all of the core pillars in place.

One of the recent genres that I fell in love with in the past few years, and something that is also gaining momentum in the industry - Rougelikes/lites (We'll be here all day if we were to discuss the semantics of the name). To name a few of the best : Dead Cells, Hades, Enter the Gungeon, Curse of the Dead Gods, Risk of Rain 2. 

 



Some might be put off by the premise of Rogelikes, but that’s where all the fun is, the whole idea is to get better every time, learn the levels, the enemies, the hazards, the best weapons and the most of all to make the best of the randomness. This associated randomness with each run is what makes these games exciting, the urge to retry immediately after you die because you had the best weapon and the best loot and the best upgrades that run and you wanting to recreate this seemingly prefect yet unsuccessful run a success the next time. One of the core principles of game design (as thought by Jarek from the book Fundamentals of Game Design) is to avoid learning through dying, but one of the other core principles is that a game designer can break one or more of these core principles themselves. So, here I am breaking it. 

So like I mentioned earlier I like to amalgamate genres and game mechanics together as a form of thought experiment. I wanted to add the careful, methodical gameplay elements of Stealth and puzzle games to the usually chaotic Action-Rougelikes, and thus "DungeoNeer" was born. To help you in forming a clearer picture imagine Bioshock or Prey meets Hades. So in essence DungeoNeer is an Action-Stealth Roughlite Metroid-Vania designed within the premise of dungeons and engineering, thus the name. So all of the combat, stealth, traversal and puzzles are based on mechanical, computer or chemical engineering. 


 


Engineering and science is something I was and I still am fascinated and intrigued by to this day. I have always had this natural curiosity to break things open and see how it works and try to put it back together. This has also helped me become a better 3D Artist, in helping me understand complex mechanical structures and their physical interactions. Something this game has a lot of.



Though I am quite well informed about the mechanical engineering world(through years of watching How it’s made on Discovery Channel and having an engineer Father) and CSE (after getting a 4yr Bachelor’s degree), the main hardship was not in understanding STEM concepts but uncovering ways to turn these into viable, playable and exciting game mechanics for a Rougelite Metroid-Vania game.

 


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