GUNBALL
Background
Dates: September 2016 - November 2016
Platform: PC
Engine: Unity 5
Role: Systems Designer/Programmer
Collaborators:
Designer/Producer: Thomas Ghulam
Programmer: Mary Scheyder
Artist: Andrea Leimer
Intention: A competitive experience that combined a 1 on 1 sports game, rocket jumping from classic first person shooters, and elements from pinball tables.
This game was made in my Senior year for my capstone project. For this project, I was placed into a team, with another designer, an artist, and a programmer, and we were tasked with creating a vertical slice of a game. We decided to create Gunball, a competitive sports game where players are equipped with rocket launchers and must capture goals in a pinball arena. The focus of the game was maneuverability, players could move and jump around normally or use their rocket launcher to propel themselves across the arena. I also created a weekly development blog for this project which is linked below. This project was created in the Unity Engine.
Iteration
During our development process, our game concept went through a few different iterations before we nailed down exactly what we wanted Gunball to be. Early in development we knew we wanted to create a game that had players using the rocket jump mechanic in a competitive sports game, but we were not sure what we wanted as our objective for the game.
We initially came up with two ideas for our game objective. One idea we came up with was a 'king of the hill' style of game. Players would compete to keep the ball on their side of the arena for the longest amount of time. The other idea was similar to soccer where players must use their rocket launchers to get the ball into one of multiple goals within the arena.
Ultimately we decided to go with the 'multiple goals' iteration of our game concept but with some major tweaks. We came up with the idea to set our game within a pinball arena where players could take advantage of the pinball elements to capture the goals on either end of the arena. The winner would be the player who had control of the most goals at the end of the match.
Our last iteration was adding power ups to our game. This would make the pinball elements more important within our game. When players would take control of the ball by shooting it and changing it to their color, they would rack up points when the ball interacted with the pinball elements. They could spend these points on power ups that could give them an advantage over their opponent.
Documentation
This is my systems list document for this project. It illustrates what players would be able to do in our game, what elements would be in the pinball arenas, and the objective of the game.
Planned Features
If we continued development on this game, our team intended to create new pinball arenas with different themes than the western arena that we already had created.
To illustrate this, we created logos for a space-themed arena and a monster-themed arena. These arenas would introduce new level layouts and new power ups for players.