Over the pass week or so we have been having regular meeting about what we would like to do for a game. We started to look at what age group we would like to aim our game to. We had the choice of the following age groups we could target for:
0 – 3
3 – 6
6 – 12
12 – 17
18 – 34
34 and over
Looking at each age group we all came to the verdict that we would aim our game to the 12 – 17 age group. The reason why we choose this age group was mainly for a challenge to see what we could come up with.
After deciding on our target audience, we started to look at what is attracting this particular audience age range in todays society. At the moment we discovered that Stephenie Meyer Twilight series was captivating our target audience. Quickly summerise what Twilight series is about, is a seventeen-year-old Isabella “Bella” Swan, who moves from Phoenix, Arizona to Forks, Washington and finds her life in danger when she falls in love with a vampire, Edward Cullen.
Now seeing as this has been highly received, we thought this would be a good road to go down the Vampire route, after doing research we came to the conclusion that Vampires haven’t been don’t to an extreme allowing us free rain to an extent on what we would do. Also the reason why we choose to go down this route was because we could draw up similarities to between our audience age group and Vampires. Here are the following examples came up with:
• Eternal damnation: Life as a teen can feel lonely and depressing, creating a kinship with the poor hell-cursed vampire!
• It’s all about change: Becoming a vampire is a painful (and sometimes confusing) time of change. Sound familiar?
• We all fancy a bad boy/girl: Dracula is bad. He’s downright evil. But how many girls had their first crush on him? Similarly, how many Buffy fans found evil vampire Willow sexier than nice normal Willow?
• Eternal life: We’re aware of how short our existence is, in the context of all we’d like to achieve. It’s not surprising then that the thought of eternal life appeals. One could be contentious and say that this is a major reason why religions are so popular too?
• Escapism: Teenagers live under various strictures. Vampires don’t have to abide by any rules, which is liberating!
So finally here is our idea for our game design project
The name of game will be called Blood Streak and will be a side-scrolling platformer. The main aim of the game is to avoid the queen vampire who is in hot pursuit. The queen vampire has the same attributes as a homing missile, and will simply head towards the player while avoiding obstacles.
The USER has to use his long jump and powers given to him by a magical sword to slow the vampire down. Powers include simply making the vampire freeze and super speed for a short amount of time.
Once the USER reaches checkpoints, gameplay will switch to mini games, they include, lock picking, barricade building, and throwing stones at a ceiling to let sunlight through.
Analysing this age group we discovered following that needed to be address if we were going to succeed in making a game for this age group:
• They need to be challenged.
• Make gameplay easy to learn but levels challenging to
master.
• Alienation and a need to prove themselves is a great
motivator for gameplay.
• Give the user as much control as possible – keyboard
setup, level difficulty etc.
So lastly, after careful discussion we came up with these solutions to overcome these problems:
• Make the game challenging. The game is going to be designed in the way that there is little room for mistakes.
• Incorporate side quests into the gameplay (mini games). These will have to be completed in order to progress in the game.
• Prove the USER with user friendly tutorials for them to learn and master the gameplay.
• Construct the game to have a steady progression however have the difficulty aspect of the game to rise towards the end of the level.
• Make the storyline motivate the USER to prove themselves.
• Also allow the USER to have as much control as possible with customization of the character look and style, keyboard controls and User profile on our website (Second Media Artifact)
