Capstone Blog Post 1: Working in Monochrome

In the process of coming up with game ideas for capstone, an idea of ours was very simple in nature. What if you made a fighting game with only two colors at your disposal? What would that look like, how would you theme it, what can you do with stage designs? To me this was a concept worth exploring, especially within the realm of level design and combat design. Mico, the other designer within our group and I took a lot of influence from an episode of the TV show Samurai Jack where the main character who is a samurai must dual another samurai. The art style within this fight becomes a dual between two character silhouettes vying for their opponents death, one in white, the other in black. Naturally after building a prototype to see how it would look and ultimately play we are quite happy with the progress we made on it within the time frame of this sprint. As a game, this concept will tie in heavily to many aspects of game design. The nature of the game brings the concept of colors and shading to the forefront of the design process. In turn, many aspects of the game conceptually mean we must throw out traditional means of communication to the player. Then there are some aspects where we can’t use some concepts in their traditional manner. An example of this is lighting. Levels are now intrinsically tied to lighting. The main mechanic of this game is the ability for your character silhouette to blend in completely into the stage.  Some parts of the stage will be your opposing color where your enemy can do the same thing. When developing stages for the players to play in we must keep these sorts of aspects in mind to keep things balanced. Both characters must have an equal enough area of their color to keep things even. Where these colors are positioned in relation to each other, what they represent in terms of thematically to the stage, what sort of agency the player has within the stages, etc.
                I have high hopes for our team’s future. This is only one of several concepts for potential games we might go with in capstone. I simply thought this game brought forth many design opportunities that could be interesting and pretty fun to explore. Our other idea’s that we intend on prototyping involve a large open landscape game with a character riding a mount taking down large creatures, and a game all about changing a battle arena with bullets that are charged with the different elements of our world such as ice and fire. During the team brain storming session we came up with about twenty different ideas alone. The rest of the ideas had some cool aspects to each of them, some of which were considered instead but ultimately dropped due to them not having a lot of staying power in terms of game mechanics to us. I’m excited to see where we go with anyone of these ideas.