The Great GDD

This week the team has been focused on producing a viable GDD (game design document) for Red Sun. It is a huge undertaking to try to pull together so much information prior to making any prototypes, but our curriculum has us doing it in this order.

Some of the more notable discussions have revolved around the UI. It is ideally all the information the player needs to make informed choices and risks. Ideally keeping the amount of information easy to read and not cluttering the screen has been the goal.

The second discussion has started about extra lives. It seems like an obvious thing to have. The classic 1up is a very common feature in a number of games. As a counter argument though, there are a number of games that have lives where they seem trivial (i.e. the recent mario games) while still being successful. There are others that have opted out of having lives entirely but the player is still able to run into the fail state of dying (usually from running out of health) like Legend of Zelda, Okami, etc.

Both of these aspects of the game have the potential to change the feel of play and going forward it will likely be an unknown until we have a working prototype to play with.