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CGD Blog #1 : Conception and Pitches

 What is Minefield?

Minefield is a co-op stealth game where a team of 4 players must sneak around behind the enemy lines to locate and disarm mines. Each of them have unique abilities that must be synergized to successfully complete their mission.



Initially, the idea for Minefield came about after learning that there are still active minefields out there even today, claiming innocent lives by the thousands, decades after they were placed. There are a few dedicated to cleaning up these minefields today, putting themselves at great risk. Originally, the game was PvP, wherein players would compete with each other to see who can disarm the most mines, but conceptually it didn't make much sense, when you wonder why someone disarming mines would compete against someone trying to do the same. So, that thought was quickly scrapped and the game was pushed in a more PvE direction, where a team of 4 players would assist each other and disarm mines while trying to avoid being detected by the enemies.

Pitches and Feedback

Last month I had to make an elevator pitch and we had Jarek and Akos there to provide some feedback on our designs. Jarek's suggestion drastically helped me improve the moment to moment gameplay and inspired me to revise my initial design and provide a clear objective to play towards from the beginning. 

Initially, the game had an open minefield where the players had to use their 'abilities' to locate and defuse the bombs, but Jarek suggested that the players could choose a long stretch of the minefield from the periphery to the enemy base and try to find and defuse all the mines within that region and then have the infantry swarm in through that route. I took this feedback to heart and sat on it for a few days trying to make it better and into something that is consistent with the existing design and also something we could potentially implement. 


Thus the "Critical path" was introduced, which was the main path along which the landmines are buried. So, the players have to focus their efforts primarily in this section of the map. There are multiple alternate routes the players could take flanking the Critical path. This helped me further alter the level design, which later became the prime focus of the game (something that always seems to happen in all of the games I design..hmm). Now, after this rework the gameplay as well as the thematic logic behind the game is more concrete and robust. More on this and how the level design enhances the gaming experience will be explored in future blog entries.

By the final pitch presentation the full design of the game was done and was ready to be finalized once we completed the pitch and got some feedback from Vasileios and Akos. Their suggestions were something I already pondered over and decided not to make the game too complicated by introducing  features that they mentioned such as having a nighttime mode, which is a great addition to any stealth game and would drastically change up the gameplay, something which I had thought of and chose not to add to the already long list of development tasks and instead add it to my GDD in the future developments section.



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