The story we are going to tell in our game is about vicar, the agent and representative of God in the human world. The player is one of the vicars. He is chosen accidentally, and he will be assign missions by God. In different missions, players will have different abilities to finish the task. The current mission we are building on is that player needs to use the ability of “control” to save people’s lives. The demo video is below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9nUh1QGYhw&feature=youtu.be

The artistic expression in visual

Since we are talking about religions and the conflicts between humanity and the doctrines of God, we tend to use pure color to form a sense of solemn, player can tell that the scene is religious relevant and the player is supposed to feel that he has contact with God. The current scene we have is:

For further design, we will also use pure color as a theme to build a scene.

The artistic expression in audio

Audio in our project will play a role in atmosphere implementation. For the first scene, which is the first time that the player comes to the altar, the player will pass by many torches and light up the fire. The process of lighting up fire will also play a sound effect. For the general background music, we will use some mysterious, religious music to create a sacred and solemn vibe for the player.

For the final project, we want to make a graphic adventure game. We will build 7 different spaces, each space has its feature color and the objects in the space will try to construct a certain kind of mental situation and express a certain kind of feeling. Also, each space will give players some information, and all 7 spaces will together present a complete story to players. 

For the scenery in each space, we expect the objects are low poly and all in the same color. And the objects we use, the location of those objects, the light effect should be in harmony to match the theme of the chapter.

For the project management, we will work on building different scenes at the same time. And we will write different scripts and be responsible for different functions. Basically, we will try to complete 2 scenes each week, and we will complete the basic gameplay mode and functions during the first week.

We want to build our gameplay mode based on the traditional sneak gameplay. So before this week, we have already built the driving system. And we have also built the turret which will detect the car when it comes into its firing range, and the there are two parts of the turret which can rotate on vertical axis and horizontal axis particularly to make the guns aim at the car, and the bullet where comes out from an empty object in front of the guns to hit the car.

In this week, we have finished the three abilities of the car. For invisible, we change the shader of the car so the player, and we change its tag so that the turrets no longer detect it. For quantization, we also change the shader of the car, and we change the car’s collider to trigger so that it can comes across the buildings. And for the transition, when player click “z”, it will creates an “echo” (a prefab of the car with another shader) at that position, and when the player activates this function, the car will travel rapidly back to the position of the “echo” and removes the echo.

Also, we have made three simple UI images to show player the left amount of the three resource in the game, hp, energy and battery. The hp is easy to understand, the energy enables the player to use abilities and the battery provide power for the car.

For me, emergent gameplay and emergent storytelling are new words for me, but I have experienced and enjoyed them for many times. And this kind of elements really bring a lot of fun to players which is actually some kinds of accidents.

Though the emergent event seems clear and simple, it is really for the designer to make an emergent storytelling. And in most situations, they are not designed on purpose. The designer should only design the basic structure of the game system, and then give up his power and leave an open and free world for players to explore. In that case, there are many potentials in the game world with which both designers and players are not familiar. And then something beyond players’ imagination would occur in a sudden to surprise them.

And in Slime Rancher, the designers do something to make the world more random and chaotic by adding explosions slime, phosphor slime and the vacpack. They all can move other objects so that no one knows what will happen next.