Player’s experience

Now that I have the game concept, I can think about what kind of experience I want for the player. Since the idea is to reach safely to the aircraft carrier, the experience that I want to achieve is something fast, frantic and hurried.

That means that while the player goes deeper and deeper into the game, the challenge should rise accordingly. 

Gameplay Design

I draw this mockup to think on the gameplay’s elements:

The main idea is that the player will guide the plane (at the bottom) trying to evade the swarm of enemies. Enemies will have three kind of pattern: predefined, trying to hunt the player if they are near, and miniboss (they will stay a while on the screen, and then disappear)

The player will have some perks/buffs that will aid her to face this challenge: speed, armor, evasive stunts, dash, and a tail gunner (thanks @fancyfatfrog for the idea!)

These elements will have a number of uses per level and some of them will have cooldown as well. So, the player should be careful about their management. For instance: at level 1 the player only has two evasive stunts and it cannot use another one after 5 seconds.

Evasive stunts and dash will provide a short time of invincibility; armor will provide some defense against bullets; increase in speed will be always active though, and tail gunner will shot from behind for a period of time (not sure yet if the tail gunner will shot everything that is half below of the plane, or it will shoot doing some patterns in the whole screen like a spiral.)

Experiments with new Input System

I decided to use the new Unity’s input system for this project since I haven’t experimented too much with it. Also, I have the intention to make a mobile version of this game after the jam and I saw that the new input system allows to make that transition in a seamless way.

I implemented the basic movement, dash and evasive stunt. It was a quick implementation of these elements. The next thing that I need is to think how to make isolated states for each of them (maybe a state machine?)

Basic Movement

Dash

Evasive stunt

Next things to do:

• Enemies movement, implementation of the three strategies
• Implementing a base stat class for each element on the game
• Think on the state machine or alternative for the perks/buffs