A Blast Through the Past

To have a game we need a hero to play as. Considering the story we opted to create revolved around time travel and sci-fi elements it was decided that the player character would be futuristic and wear a power suit/armour of sorts with a gun on the arm to allow the player to shoot. We wanted the future federation of the story to have a sterile look and decided on a white and light/pale blue to be the colour scheme with hints of grey and black to break up the design. these colours will also stand out against most background and colours. We wanted the player characters armour to also match this design ethic with white as a base colour with light blue trim/lighting on the design. To get inspiration we looked through other action platformer characters among other things. Below are said inspirations for the design of the hero. These characters influence the design for the armour in many ways, such a the shape and style of it. You can see pieces of each in the final design even if only in subtle ways. one of the big issues was getting a helmet design right and what style of visor to use.

 

The games story will involve the main character working for a time agency in the future when the villain attacks the agency and blows the player back in time. Agency tech lands with the player in the age of the dinosaurs. The player gets through this first world and defeats a boss, to find the agency tech and use it to jump forward in time due to it being damaged putting them into the ice age. The same thing happens ith each world earning the player character agency tech to jump forward in time even more till they get back to the future to fight the main villain. This story will allow for multiple level themes including level themes that are common in platformers as well as more unique ones. These include a dinosaur jungle level, Ice age ice level, Ancient Egypt desert level, Victorian steampunk, and modern day digital/cyberpunk level.

For this project we wanted to do something much more advanced in unity than last semester. Over the christmas period we discussed what kind of things to do before landing on the idea to create a game. we then chose to make a 2D game over a 3D game due to being able to do something different after working with unity’s 3d mode for all of last semester. We then decided to great a 2D platformer game due to how varied the genre can be. We settled on a sci-fi themes shooter/platformer similar in concept to the Metroid series, Cuphead, Megaman Series and Megaman X series. To differentiate this sub-genre of platformer though we will be adding mouse controls for the shooting. meaning shooting won’t go straight forward from the players location but the where the players mouse is allowing for more dynamic enemies and levels. Metroid does allow you to shoot in multiple directions as does cuphead but nothing as accurate as following the exact mouse location. Also because of this the player will have to control the character and platforming as normal as well as manage the shooting element with a mouse. Below will be linked videos for the main inspirations for the gameplay.