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Senior Project, post 02: Research and idea development

With my idea now decided, it's now time to begin research on how I'm actually going to go about creating it.

Game Engine and framework

I'll be using Unity for this project - it's what I've used during my time at SCAD Hong Kong, and although I got some experience with Unreal over the summer I'd rather stick to something I'm more familiar with for my senior project.


Within Unity are a bunch of packages that I'm keen to use - their new Input System, the VFX graph, and the Shader Graph, to name a few. Unfortunately, when I looked into support for multiplayer , I came across this blog post on the Unity site - they're overhauling their multiplayer systems at an inopportune time for me. Following their guide, I've decided to use a third-party framework, Photon Bolt, for my networking needs.

Gameplay

I've decided to stray further from the Tron games and take more inspiration from the recent(ish) film, Tron: Legacy, which had a light-cycle battle scene where the competitors weren't restricted to a subset of directions but had complete freedom of movement. This actually reminded me of a game I played a lot in the past, Achtung die Kurve. I put together a quick demonstration of what I imagine my gameplay will be, from a top-down perspective - it's easier to show rather than tell.

I've also done some brainstorming on the game's mechanics. The core gameplay revolves around not running into walls, and there are two ways to do this - moving out of the way, or being the same colour as them. As demonstrated above, I think an analog movement system is the way to go, but when it comes to colour switching there's a few more things to consider.


I definitely want a limit on how often you can switch your colour, and there's a few ways to approach this. I could either implement a cooldown on switching in general - so you can only switch once every few seconds - or perhaps each colour is tracked separately. At the same time, I want players to engage with this colour switching mechanic. While I could definitely introduce the concept in a tutorial, I'm still considering whether forcing players to switch - so they don't stay one colour the whole game - is a good idea. The action of switching, too, needs attention. I think I'd like for switching to take time - which would demand that players plan their moves in advance, and also allow them to react to each other. However, these decisions can't really be made without testing, but being aware of them, at this stage, still helps shape the development process.


On the topic of furthering the game's mechanics, many racing games have powerups (the Mario Kart series comes to mind). I'd like to do the same. GTA 5 has a game mode called "Deadline", which is heavily inspired by Tron, and contains a few powerups - a jump, a speed boost and a temporal slowdown. I'd suggest one more - a "sharp turn" ability, a nod to the original Tron, that lets you instantaneously make a sharp left or right turn. These all affect movement, but what about colour? I've been playing a lot of Final Fantasy XIV, and one of the abilities is called "Swiftcast", which lets you reduce a spell's cast time to zero. Perhaps I could implement this in my game, but again, this would need testing.

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