Welcome to Week 1 of my game of Productive Bingo! This week’s challenge is to make a video game for my boyfriend, Max. Here, I will detail the beginning steps for how I designed the game and make more posts when I make more progress.
Max, I suggest you turn back if you don’t want any spoilers. If you’re too impatient, well, then knock yourself out and act surprised when I show it to you.
Overview
Before I start, let me tell you about the game-in-progress, Pizza Run!
You will play as a bear that needs to reach the pizza store and avoid any obstacles in the way. For now, the only obstacles we have are a gaggle of geese with some digestion issues. Watch out below! On your way over, you may find some helpful stores to help you on your journey.
Simple enough, right? I had some additional ideas, but I won’t consider implementing them until I finish at least the MVP (minimal viable product).
Brainstorming
Now that you know what the game is all about, let’s go over the process. The first step was, of course, to think of the idea in the first place!
I started by picking out the player character, goal, and obstacles. Since bears are Max’s favorite animal, it was easy to pick the protagonist. And since pizza is his favorite food, it was easy to pick a goal. Then I had to think of something he hated to use as the enemy – geese. Especially Canadian geese. Boom, done.
Thinking of gameplay was more difficult. Originally, I wanted to create a beat ’em up sort of game, but I figured I didn’t have the time to create AI for the enemies nor draw out all of the art and animation that would be required, especially without a drawing tablet handy.
Thus, came the idea of pooping geese – two frames for flying and maybe one frame for pooping, if that’s even necessary. And poop itself should be easy enough to draw.
And for the bear itself, we would only need an idle and running animation, which might require… hm… five frames total? I’m probably underestimating that to be honest.
We could also add an animation for the shop doors opening and closing, but even that might not be necessary.
So that’s our idea – Run to pizza shop and avoid being pooped on.
Mockup
Now that I had an idea, I needed to draw it out. If you somehow missed the image of bear running through some commercial streets with a wide-eyed, poop-brewing goose above, well, scroll up because that’s the mockup.
While I imagine most people would start with the characters, I started by drawing the background. Well, I drew the streets and the shopfronts first anyway. This made it easier to place the character and size him correctly.
Next I drew the bear itself, trying to make him look as simple as possible while still resembling a bear.
Then I drew the goose, which was weirdly fun to draw.
And finally added the finishing touches with the greenery, mountains, and clouds in the background.
And that’s it!
Next Steps
Our goal, first and foremost, is to create an MVP. To achieve that, we will need to first create a prototype, in which art and animation will be taking a backseat to function. I will be utilizing whatever I have already drawn in the mockup for now. But even before that, we’ll need to set up our Unity project!
Join me in my next post to read about how will set up my Unity project and git repository.