Computer Science 113 / Informatics 125. Computer Game Development. Design Document

Transcription

1 Introduction Computer Science 113 / Informatics 125 Computer Game Development Design Document Our game is a 2-Dimensional fighting game inspired by and similar to renowned fighting games such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken. The intended platform is the Android smart phone, running Android v2.2. The theme is celebrities turned into fighters with attacks characteristic of them and their on-screen personalities. There will be stages for the celebrities to fight on and music and sound effects to listen to while doing so. The game is intended to be natural-feeling and familiar to other well known fighting games so that the player can jump right in, play and enjoy the game. Table of Contents 1

2 Overview(Executive Summary) 3 Game Specifications 5 Rules and Mechanics Gameplay 5 Characters 7 Steve Jobs Mark Zuckerberg King Leonidas Emma Watson/ Hermione Granger Music 10 Artificial Intelligence 10 Technical Specs 11 Generic Character Moves Stages Hardware Version Control Schedule and Personel 14 Overview (Executive Summary) The theme of our fighting game is famous celebrities, and their on-screen personalities, fighting each other with attacks characteristic of them. So far, we are planning on creating fighting characters based on Steve Jobs, Gerard Butler, Mark Zuckerberg and Emma Watson. For game play, Steve Jobs would throw iphones at the opponent and be holding an ipad to attack and defend with, while Emma Watson would have a wand that casts magic attacks at the enemy. There is no background story; the player encounters a main menu when the game application starts and when he or she selects to start, goes straight into fighting some character. We will most likely have a game mode of increasing difficulty of opponents. The enemies will be controlled by 2

3 artificial intelligence structured to create a formidable fighting opponent. Game play will be in many ways typical of the fighting game genre. Players will control a single character s movement and attacks, in an effort to bring their opponent s health down before being critically damaged themselves. Combination moves, consisting of strings of button presses, will result in higher-damage attacks. SOMETHING ABOUT ART DESIGN/THEME (cartoon-ish? dark/silly/realistic?) This game will run on the Android OS, utilizing the touchscreen for full control of the player character. 3

4 WWDC. Stage for Steve Jobs, 4

5 Game Specification Rules and Mechanics: Modes: The game can be played in 3 different modes: story, arcade, survival. Story mode is where a player chooses one character and follows that character s journey to the end. The journey is mainly composed of fighting 6-7 characters in succession. This mode can be played on easy, normal, or hard setting. The arcade mode is where the player can choose his or her character as well as the opponent for that character. The difficulty level of the opponent can be set as well. Survival mode is where the player chooses one character and is pitted against a succession of opponents. After the player defeats an opponent, he only gains back some of his health. The game ends when the player s character loses all its health. 5

6 Gameplay: The game must be played with the phone held sideways to give a more natural feel to the mostly horizontal movements of the fighters. There will be directional keys displayed on the screen on the left hand side to move your fighter up, down, left, right, two upward diagonals for jumping forward and backward, and two downward diagonals for crouching while moving backward and forward. The attack buttons will be on the right hand side with one button each for strong upper hit, weak upper hit, strong lower hit, and weak lower hit. The strong upper hit makes your fighter do a high damage but slow attack to the upper body to head region of someone standing still and with the same height of your fighter. The weak upper hit is like the strong upper hit except the attack has low damage and is faster. The strong lower hit is a high damage but slow attack to the lower body, and the weak lower hit is a weak damage but fast attack to the lower body. By pressing the directional buttons, your fighter moves in that direction relative to where he or she is at the moment, and by keeping the button down, they continue to move in that direction. Only two directional buttons can be pressed at a time (two because it allows you to slide your finger to an adjacent button smoothly). The fighters will always face each other but the direction keys will always move them relative to the screen. Only one attack button can be pressed at a time but they can be pressed concurrently with directional buttons but the attack takes precedence and your fighter will most likely stay stationary while attacking unless they are in the air after a jump. Pressing the downward button will make your fighter crouch, and. Finally, moving the fighter backward, relative to which way they are facing, and when the opponent does an attack, your fighter will do a blocking move to block the attack every time, even while in the air and no matter how far away they are. Like in most fighting games, there will be combo moves (combinations of attacks and/or directional buttons) that a player can successfully pull off by completely pressing a predefined sequence of buttons relatively rapidly. In addition to the special moves listed below, all fighters will have a regular combo from pressing three or two of the same attack buttons in quick succession of each other. Pressing down and an attack will make the fighter do an attack while crouching. We may also incorporate grappling/throwing or close combat moves for when the fighters are close enough together to do them. All fighters have health bars to keep track of how much damage they received from their opponent. When the fighter s health bar is drained all the way, they are knocked unconscious and the opponent wins the round. There are five rounds and the fighter that wins best of five wins the stage/level. To keep it fair, all fighters will have the same amount of health but the damage they deal and the speed with which they deal it will be different and regulated to make a balanced game. The stages are big enough to fit about one and a half screens of a Nexus One phone. So, the actual stage will be larger than can be shown, and fighters can move to the extra areas by trying to move out of the phone s screen (where the extra areas are) and the visible stage will center towards that area. The visible stage cannot be changed if both fighters are up against both edges. 6

7 The visible stage is a fixed dimension (the size of the phone s screen) so there will not be any zooming in nor out. Like typical fighting games, there will be a maximum of two characters active at a time. Characters start off facing each other. A 3 second pregame countdown will begin the fight. Once the pregame countdown finishes the player can start to move his character and the game timer starts counting down. Each round lasts at most 90 seconds. If at the end of the round neither character is knocked out, the character with the most health is declared the winner. To knock out a character the opponent has to deal enough damage to deplete its health bar. Characters: P- normal punch HP- hard punch K- normal kick HK- hard kick Speed: 1-3, 1 being fastest Damage: %, calculated based on full health Directions: Steve Jobs Move List: Special Moves: Knee to groin- HK Dmg-20% Unworthy slap- P Dmg-20% Rainbow Wheel of Death- KK 7

8 Dmg-30% Special Combo Moves: Mark Zuckerberg Mac-In-Tosh- P P Dmg-45% Window Smasher- K P Dmg-40% Move List: Special Moves: Thumbs Down- P Dmg-10% Add Me- K Dmg-15% Code Crunch- HP Dmg-25% Special Combo Moves: King Leonidas I Made Facebook- K HK Makes Zuckerberg immune to damage for 3 seconds Dmg-0% Speed-1 Friends List- HP P Sends a crowd of friends running across the screen toward opponent Dmg-30% 8

9 Move List: Special Moves: Phalanx- HP Dmg-15% Speed-1 Spear- K P Dmg-20% 8-Pack Abs- P Dmg-20% Special Combo Moves: Sparta Kick- HK Dmg-50% This is Sparta!l- P K HP HK Dmg-35% Emma Watson / Hermione Granger Move List: Special Moves: Alohamora- P Dmg-15% Speed-1 Wingardium Laviosa- Dmg-20% Polyjuice Potion- P Dmg-20% Special Combo Moves: K K 10 Points for Gryffindor- HK Dmg-10% each hit up to 5 hits 9

10 Speed-1 50 Points for Gryffindor!- P P P K K K Dmg-50% Music: The music will not necessarily be matching the stages as the themes of the stages may change in the future. Instead, the music will be upbeat instrumental songs with guitar melodies and drum beats all made on an electronic keyboard. Inspiration for the music comes from popular fighting games such as Street Fighter and Marvel vs Capcom, as well as old 90 s games with the 8-bit sounds that they had. There will be at least 3 songs and a random song will be played for each stage so that players wont have to repeatedly listen to the same song for a stage they prefer. Artificial Intelligence: Artificial intelligence of this is mainly going to be based on probabilistic chances. These probabilities depend also on what difficulty the character is set as. For example, characters set on hard difficulty will more likely block attacks from the player, whereas characters set on lower difficulty will have less of a chance of blocking the player s attacks. Hard level opponents will also be more aggressive in their fighting styles, attacking more often, and will have higher probabilities of using stronger move sets. We probably wont be making an optimal opponent so damage and speed will not be involved in any formulas. We will simply have an arbitrary percentage value of how often the opponent will use certain moves based on difficulty and distance from the player. Easy Difficulty: Opponents will mostly stay stationary and do simple moves. They will almost never do special moves, and they will block most of the time. Medium Difficulty: Opponents will tend to move towards the player and do more complex moves. They will do special moves more often than Easy opponents, and they will block more as well. Hard Difficulty: Opponents will keep moving towards the player while doing all kinds of moves. They will block only when the player attacks but will prefer to attack back. 10

11 Technical Specs Generic Character Moves: Attacks: Each character has a punch (P), hard punch (HP), kick (K), hard kick (HK). Damages and speeds at which the attack launches are the same for all characters and are as follows: Speeds are ranked from 1-5, 1 being the fastest. punch(p)- 5% dmg, speed 1 kick(k)- 5% dmg, speed 1 hard punch(hp)- 10% dmg, speed 2 hard kick(hk)-10% dmg, speed 2 Characters can also block attacks. Blocking attacks required the player to press the back directional button. So if the player s character is on the left side of the screen and the opponent is on the right, pressing left will block an oncoming attack from the opponent and vise-versa. Blocking low attacks requires the character to be already in the crouched position and pressing the back directional button. Movements: Character movement is done by the 4 directional buttons placed at the bottom left of the screen. Players can hold down the directional buttons to move at a steady rate. Not all characters have the same movement speeds. Double-tapping a directional button allows the character to move in that direction with a short dash. This either closes the distance faster between the player and the opponent or can be used as a temporary retreat. Double-tapping only works for the left and right directional buttons. Stages: There will be at least 3 stages (background settings) to fight in. They will not be interactive but there may be looped animations shown here and there. One stage is the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference stage where the fighters are on stage and the audience is in the background, possibly cheering. Another stage is the 300 movie s rendition of the pass of Thermopylae ( The Hot Gates ) where the fighters will be in front of the entrance to the cave/ valley-like pass. The third stage will be an idyllic field with Hogwarts in the distant background. These stages are representative of three of the characters in the game: Steve Jobs, King Leonidas, and Hermione Granger, respectively. 11

12 Stages are set to be 20 times the width of a character so players will have plenty of room to position their characters. Software/Hardware: We will be using the Java programming language to make our game. We are making an Android game using the Android SDK which uses Java. We will also have to use a little bit of XML for creating the manifest.xml file required in Android projects. For test purposes, we have a host of Android emulators with Android operating systems Our game will be targeting mostly 2.1 to Android devices which consists of most modern Android smart phones devices are Android tablets which we will not be testing heavily on, but our game should still be supported on them. The physical devices we have that we can test on our game on is a Nexus One running Android and a HTC Evo 4G running Android We are using Unfuddle for Subversion hosting and an Eclipse plugin called Subclipse to interact with that Subversion server to share our files. Version Control: We are using SVN for version control. All of the team members have downloaded the eclipse plugin subclipse which acts as a version control manager for projects within eclipse. For our repository we are using Unfuddle which hosts both Git ans Subversion repositories. We plan on only commiting code during team meetings so that in case something breaks, everyone will be there and the one(s) responsible will be able to fix it. 12

13 Every screen that the end user interacts with extends the android.app.activity class. For our game we will have four screens. Menu The menu is the first screen that shows up when the app is launched. It is where the player chooses which game mode he wants to player, or if he wants to view the Options menu Character Selection This where the player selects which character they want to play as. ActionScreen This is the screen where the actual game play takes place. This is where the player fights his opponent Options This is where the player selects options (sound, difficulty, etc) 13

14 Every unique character will inherit shared properties from a Character super class. Then both the player and the computer will extend the character class which they will play as. Schedule and Personnel Ian Kim - art design, coding, music direction Jason Lu - art design, coding Arash Vaghti - coding, testing Peter Park - coding, music design Outside Help William Hillhouse - music creation Schedule: theme/art sketches - week 5 background/stage sketches- week 5 basic player character movement/action implementation - week 6 basic hit detection/character interaction implementation - week 6 basic player health/status tracking - week 7 basic character animations - week 7 14

15 different character animations - week 8 rudimentary menus - week 8 additional character artwork - week 8 first music draft - week 8 gameplay testing- week 9 export to android device- week 9 background/stage artwork - week 9 testing/ bug fixing- week 10 Statements from each team member: Jason- A complete set of character sprites by week 6. A second set of character sprites by week 8. Learn API and documentation of Android platform. Investigate best way for collision detection in fighting games. Need both melee and projectile collision detection. Ian- Working with Jason to create character sprites. Will be paying most attention to game play: seeing if the AI is performing well, keeping the fighters balanced and fair, testing whether moves should be added or removed, recommending changes to the collision detection (range of an attack may be too high or too low). Also working with roommate to create background music for the stages. Will probably make the sound effects as well. Peter Arash - Working on infrastructure. Creating the Android activity classes that represent screens the end user sees. Testing on device and emulators, as well as unit tests where appropriate to ensure scalable code. Creating an intuitive user interface. 15