Okay.
In this lecture, we're going to be talking about the game design for the delivery driver project.
Why don't we talk about game design?
Well, I think it's really important to establish some general guidelines for what it is we're going
to work on.
And so, you know how to make better decisions throughout the process.
It's really, really useful to start with a gameplay overview screen like I've got here.
It can be a very rough mock up with little cubes and circles and what have you, just so you get a feel
for your game and you can start to visualize how your game is going to play.
So in our game we need to have the player's car.
We need to have some obstacles you can bump into.
I'd like to have some speed up things that allow me to go a little bit quicker.
Also, we need to have some sort of packages that you pick up.
When you pick them up, they disappear and then we have the customer or some sort of delivery spot that
we have to deliver the package to.
We're not looking for something super sophisticated, just the general mechanic of you can drive, speed
up, pick up things, bump into things and deliver to the customer.
Now, if we look at the game mechanics that we need to build, we need to start thinking about what
are we programming, what do we have to create as developers?
Well, we need to have our car driving forwards, and I'd also like to have it driving backwards.
We need to have the car able to turn left and to turn right.
Obviously, we want to be able to increase the speed of our car when we drive over speed ups and also
decrease the speed of the car when we bump into slowdowns.
We also need to have some sort of mechanism so we can pick up packages when we drive over them and also
some mechanism to deliver packages when we drive over the delivery spot.
So in our code we need a way to pick up and put down the packages.
And also I'd like to have within our code a way to change something about our game.
And I think the color of the car is a good way to show the status of whether you have picked up the
package or whether you've had to slow down or whether you're going fast.
And just a simple change of the color I think will allow us to do that.
I also like to cover three main things when I'm creating a game, particularly when we're creating these
small games, I like to look at the player experience.
Well, what is the player experience?
This is the feeling you want your player to have when they're playing your game.
For me, I'm looking for a relaxing feeling, just driving around, picking up things, going a little
bit faster, a little bit slower.
I'm not looking for an experience which might be, say, frantic or might be make the player feel clever
or might make the player feel rushed or panicking.
I'm not going for that.
I'm just going for relaxing.
So it's good for you to identify what's the feeling you want the player to have and also just to jot
down the core mechanic.
For us, it's really simple.
You drive over pick ups, that's our core mechanic.
So you roll over these speed things to speed you up.
You drive over packages, you drive over where the customer is, what's the game loop?
Find and deliver all the packages to win the game.
So I encourage you whenever you're working on a new project just to be thinking about these things.
It's not a lot of work to jot down these three things, but once you start to build your project properly,
you want to keep referring back to these and be consistent with a particularly the player experience.
Don't start off making a relaxing game.
Then halfway through say, Oh, I'll make it frantic and then decide you're going to make it a puzzle
game that will lead to a game that doesn't feel coherent.
Okay, so there's not much to do in this lecture, except I do have a quick challenge for you.
I'd like you to let us know in the forum discussions, and I've given you a link that you can click
on to take you to the right spot.
What is your player delivering?
So for my game, what am I delivering?
Well, I'm going to be delivering tasty donuts to game development instructors whose wives are currently
out of the house and won't know that the game development instructor is eating junk food when he should
actually be eating roasted kale or some other sort of appropriate for someone your age type of snack.
So that might be a little bit too much to communicate to the player, but we'll give it a shot and see
how it goes.
Delivering tasty donuts for these poor, unfortunate people at home that are well, you get the picture.
So anyway, there's the challenge.
There's a context for it.
Take on that challenge when you're done, when you've posted what you're delivering, jump into the
next lecture and we'll continue on starting to create our project.