wk1: LEGO Game Proposal

– Prompt –

What is the real life experience that you want to embedded in your lego game?
What is the creative game experience reflecting the real life experience?
Documentation part of the 1st week development.

– Proposal –

In this LEGO game, I want to embed the real-life experience of people taking the physical challenges in those Challenge Reality Shows, such as 智勇大冲关 and 男生女生向前冲. The inspiration came after I watched the tutorials for Lego Microgame, which is a template that highly encourages actions like running and jumping and has special visuals of LEGO bricks. Such mechanism reminds me of those challenge shows on TV in real life, where there are normally 4-6 different challenges set relatively high above the swimming pool so that challengers wouldn’t get hurt when falling off. Some of the typical settings are as follows (see figures below). The challenges examine not only people’s intense actions like jumping and sprinting but also quick reactions to different situations within only one opportunity.

Converting it online, I would consider it more a learning-based gameplay rather than a pure examination of players’ reactions. Although physical actions are highly limited in terms of video games, part of the gameplay is designed to be challenging that requires subtle balancing between jumping (space key) and forwarding (arrow key) through keyboard controls. Although it might be hard to pass all challenges at one time, players could gradually learn the tricks through multiple attempts, unlike the one-time experience in TV shows. Moreover, to concretize the obstacle of examining challengers’ instant judgment and reaction facing different situations, I assigned some pickups along the way, with all of which players could trigger the final elevator to success in the end. Players are expected to change views with mouse interactions in order to identify each pickup along the way. Otherwise, they might return back for missing pickups in order to win the game.

As it is my first time using Unity, for the first week I’m focusing on getting familiar with the LEGO template and Unity interfaces/functions/general geometries/special assets, as well as constructing the overall structures of four challenges. Further polishments such as map design and challenge adjustment are expected during the second week.