A change of look... Going retro...

From taking anouther look back at my first designs on my boards, I have decided to change the overall look for that game.
I always had the idea of doing a kinda updated version of Space Invaders, they way that alien space ships are droping down and you have to shoot at them all, but I have now decided to add a retro feel to it. This comes from mainly looking at the effects and the score bit that I have done on the second board. So the overall game will look like a cross between retro and modern.
The first place that I will look at to get further ideas for this will be the game Darwinia.
www.darwinia.co.uk

First boards

These are my first boards to try and get across my look and feel for that game that I will design:
Board 1
Board 2

The Ship

Thsis is a sketch of that the "ship" will look like in the game:

Futuristic Citys

Here are some image that I have been using for inspiration odf the city landscape:

Idea

As my design boards are not quite finished yet, so I cant add them onto here, I'm going to try and outline my basic idea.
The game will be set in the year 2020 but as tho it was designed in the 1960's. So it will have that 60's futuristic look to it. For example there cars having like big wings on the back.
It will also be slightly based on the classic Space Invaders game, the way that you will be flying a "ship" around a futuristic city and alien spaceship will be dropping down in front of you, shooting at you. But as well as shooting back and avoiding them, you must also wive your way in and out of the buildings.
The buildings can be shot at and blown up by the aliens, but also by the player, all through the idea is to protect as much as possible of the city.
To get an idea of that the "ships" and the city will look like I will continue my research into what the past thought of the future, mainly what the 1960's view was of the year 2020 as well as even earl yer. For example the film Metropolis was filmed in 1924 and is set in 2000 and shows a very futuristic city landscape.

Game ideas

While reading through the project brief again, I picked up on the part stating "industrial cutesy cubism". From this I have now started producing a number of test environments in 3D around this cubism idea.
One of these ideas is setting the whole idea for the game.
The player will control some sort of "ship" around a futuristic city. The city will be set at night and be made up of huge skyscraper buildings, all look very similar. As its night, the buildings will all be lit up, with the night sky overhead and a dark fog underneath the payer. This fog will be in place so that the ground does not have to be modeled as well as adding to the atmosphere.
Alien ships will fly in front and have to be shot down by the player.
As well as the ship exploding when hit and shot down, all the buildings will be able to take fire from both the player and the enemies.

First steps

I desided that the first thing to do was to resarch into this type of game gener, into shump games and that is exactly meant by 'on rails'.

A shump is a scrolling shoot 'em up game, scrolling from left to right or up and down. The player normaly controls a 'ship' and has to shoot at veriouse enemys/objects on screen, while the screen is scrolling along. These games are generaly scroe driven, awarding the player with points for shooting the veriouse objects. This as well as levels, adds a compertition aspect to the game.

By the term 'on rails', this means that the player is not controling the direction of where they are heading in the game. An example of this may he a pasanger on a train, he can move arond on the train, ie. up and down carriadages, but he canot move off the moving train and the train must stay on the tracks, therefor having a start and a pre-determined ending point.
Anouther example of this would be games that use a light gun, like Time Crisis, the player is not controling the direction in which they move, but are just shooting at the enemys that are on screen.

Thinking Games - Shumps

The breif

The brief for this project was initial set by a big computer games company for there employees over the summer, and was not actualy made into a game.
The breif can be viewed here.