Game Idea Research

So last week our game idea research began and I had to brainstorm and come up with 4 possible game ideas. 

They were:

1. A Golf/Bowling Combination
2. A Halloween themed bicycle game
3. A Boat on a river collecting times
4. A Supermarket Sweep inspired game

After doing some research into each one, the game I decided to focus on for the rest of the semester is the one that involves a boat on a river collecting items. I have went for this particular one because after doing the Unity Tutorials over the past couple of weeks I think I have gained similar enough skills to do a decent job. I have looked on Unity and Youtube and have found multiple videos that have given me inspiration. 

Game Mechanics 

Movement 

The first Game Mechanic I had to take into consideration is probably the most important one, Movement. It's the one thing the player of the game will need to be able to do start the game and to continue it.  As it's a moving river I'm only going to let the player go forwards and sidewards when collecting. 

Aim - What will player be doing?

I then thought to myself what was the aim of the game? The player will be flowing down a river collecting coins while trying to avoid different objects that will come in its path. 

Game Over

The final thing I needed to decide was how would the game end. I think the number of coins needed to be collected to complete the game will be between 20-30 with a time limit to achieve this goal. If the player collects all these coins it will result in the game being over, if they don't, they lose. Another thing I want to include is that if you come in contact with any of the obstacles along the river e.g Trees, Rocks it will also result in the game being over. 

The first thing I did after deciding on which game I wanted to focus on was went straight to the Unity Website to look for some tutorials. I went to the tutorials section of the website and searched plenty of different words relating to my game e.g River, Water, Boat but there were no results. I thought about all the different elements in my game and how I would successfully include them and below are the different tutorials I found.

When I couldn't find any results on Unity I then went to YouTube to see if I would have any luck there and I was actually surprised at how much help there was available. I searched the same words along with "Unity Tutorial" and had so many matches. 

The first video that I watched can be seen here. It wasn't exactly the most helpful video as it was sped up with no step by step but it gave me some hope that what I wanted to achieve was possible. In the video the creator makes a river/mountain scene which is definitely too complex for my level but hopefully with some hard work I will be able to get to this skill level one day! It was also really cool to see what you can achieve in Unity because as of now all we have done has been pretty basic stuff.

The second video that I watched can be seen here. The creator makes a scene that looks more like what we have been doing the past couple of weeks. In the video he shows how to bring a boat into your scene, how to make it float on water and how to move it around the scene using the arrow keys (which hopefully I will be able to do by myself at that point). A similar video that I found can be seen here. I didn't think this one was as easy to follow and may be a little to complex for the game I see in my head. What I see in my head right now is a more cartoon animation kind of game rather than the animation used in that tutorial which I think looked quite realistic. 

As I mentioned above the aim of my game is to travel down the river and to collect coins along your way so my next step was to find videos that could help me figure out how to do this. The video that I watched can be seen here. In it the creator does a step by step on how to bring coins into Unity and goes through the code you need to input into Visual Studio to make it possible to collect the coins.

I then started to think about what happens once you complete the game. I started to look up different tutorials on ways to have a message to say you had won the game and found this. I don't know if I'm being a bit optimistic by wanting to add this feature as it looks like it could be a little bit tricky. 

I also thought about what happen if you did hit an obstacle and the players game ended. I found this guys YouTube channel, he's quite big and has loads of different helpful Unity Tutorials. This one specifically focused on a Game Over feature. 

So far I have found videos for the River, Boat and Coins. I needed one more thing which was assets that include Trees. I found this video that has a tutorial and in its bio it links to all the different assets I may need.

In my game I have mentioned that one of the features is trying to avoid obstacles as you move down the river, this may include something falling so I wanted to see if there was anything information regarding this. I had looked on YouTube for all the other tasks I knew I wanted to complete so decided instead I would look somewhere else for inspiration. I seen on the Unity Website there is a forum section were you can ask questions, answer other peoples questions and get involved with the Unity Community. I looked up about falling obstacles and this forum post came up. In the comments of the forum other users suggest alternative methods and one even linked a YouTube video that may help out.

Sketch

I was thinking of ways to show my ideas so thought that I would include a quick sketch* of what I'm thinking of doing. 

Photo Information - Own Sketch

*Very quick Sketch

Overall I think the research I have completed will be a great help to making my game. The links above cover loads of different aspects with my game and I hope over the next few weeks I can add even more tutorials/forum posts to my research. Although I have plenty of different videos that may help me I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit nervous for how my final game is going to go. 

Thanks for reading! Any feedback at all would be great and if you're a student reading this and your game shares any similar traits with my one feel free to comment on this post with any research that you found and that you have found helpful!