For this week, the team had some major breakthroughs on the mechanism for the game. After several debate and playtest feedback from last week, the team decided to adopt the turn-based plus real time action system approach. This game design was commonly used in plenty of strategy games on the market and our approach was specifically inspired by the game Valkyria Chronicles series.
This game came up during our research of current strategy video games in the market. It combines real time third person shooting mode with its unique acritical map to enable players to have an engaging experience both in strategy planning and intensive shooting game experience.
In the tactical map, the players have a single action point pool. Each action point can activate a friendly unit on the map. Since the action points are shared by players, they need to talk to each other to distribute on the usage of action points among the available unit. The location and status of units’ are directly reflected in the tactical map.
In the real time mode, the perspective changes to third person view and players can move the activated unit freely in the 3D world. Each activation is limited by the energy bar. All operations the unit performs will consume some portions of the bar. When the energy is running out, the unit finishes its activation and the game returns the players back to the tactical map mode.
So now the team has a clear direction of the game mechanism for the project. What how we can merge this mechanism into the project? How to justify the existence of energy bar and action points? The team continues to work on the design of these parts so that the Valkyrie system can work in our project fluently.
For this week, the team also presents the current progress to the faculties from all over the department. The team mentions various aspects of the project including game mechanism, target audience and possible art assets. The main feedback from faculties is the need to come up with a detailed story to justify all the gaming mechanisms and to achieve the transformational goal: to raise public’s awareness on the landmine issues around world and to show them how eDemining can help.