Game High Concept – Fun easy game for all ages.
Chase and cage the pesky aliens that are chewing up the maintenance deck cables
before the ship returns to hyperspace.
1st Level & Objective
I - where/when- location?
Bowel of Ship/maintenance deck. Somewhere
in the distant future.
II - Objective- what do you have to do?
Need to fix ship before it can take off
with cargo load. Rid the ship of alien infestation, aliens harmless, but
chewing on wires. Need to catch them and put them in a cage, then transport
back to ground. Do it within a certain amount of time.
III - Items- what new items or skills can
you gain?
Find tools, repair chewed wires, collect
aliens, while walking around, can accumulate treats to tempt them out of
hiding/get closer to them so you can catch them. Once repaired and all aliens
caged, door out of maintenance deck opens and you leave.
IV - Obstacles- can be actual characters or even
elements of the environment itself
Platforms and hiding places make catching
aliens harder, anti-cores will negate any rewards you’ve found. See following
for details.
V - Actions- What do you actually get to do
in this level?
Collect treats, glowing and hiding under
things. This will be timed.
Collect tools to fix chewed wires, will
not really affect time, these you run over and hit a button when you’re close
to a chewed wire.
Collect “time cores” that slow time down
for the next 30 seconds so you have more time.
Collect “freeze cores” that freeze all
aliens for 15 seconds.
Collect “slow cores” that slows down
aliens for 15 seconds.
Avoid the anti-cores, anti-time speeds up
time, anti-freeze unfreezes aliens before 15 seconds up, anti-slow will speed
up aliens for 15 seconds (a slow core picked up afterwards will return them to
normal speed). Will
Collect aliens and put them in a cage.
You can hold two at a time.
VI - End Goal- What is the end goal of each
level? What do you have to do to
reach the end of the level and move on to the next?
Make sure all the wires are repaired.
Collect aliens and contain them within the allotted time.
2 - Plus draw a map of your game level.
Label all of the above things on your map.
In the final boss fight of Portal 2, Chell pairs up with her mortal, or rather non-mortal enemy, GLaDOS, to defeat Wheatley. Wheatley has uploaded GLaDOS's personality core into a potato, taking over her mechanics, and becoming corrupt with power. He is insulted when GLaDOS calls him an "intelligence dampening sphere" only made to damper her own superior intelligence. He throws GLaDOS down an elevator shaft and Chell has to now descend, recover GLaDOS, and traverse the innards of Aperture Science Laboratories to return GLaDOS to her rightful place before Wheatley destroys the labs and everyone in it. Well...technically, it's just you and a bunch of robots.
Events leading up to:
After the last portal, you/Chell is put into a deep sleep and wakes up 999999 after. Although whether this is a glitch in the recording or not, considering they never say days, hours, or years, it could mean any amount of time after. The back up power generators have run out and that’s why you were no longer able to be kept in suspended animation. Wheatley, a robot that helps guide you for the next part of the game, plans to help you escape, but accidentally awakens GLaDOS, who makes you complete test chambers like she did in the first Portal. Again, like the first one, she is a murdering trickster who plans to kill you, so you have to be careful completing the tests. There are things like “Thermal Discouragement Beams”, turrets, and neurotoxins. Wheatley and Chell plan to escape by disabling GLaDOS, replacing her personality core with his so that he will have full control of the facilities. He activates the exit lift and you think it’s all over, but GLaDOS’s body has its own programming and Wheatley becomes instilled with a new set of goals - to continue subjecting you to test chambers. However, Wheatley is not very smart and his test chambers are terrible. They don’t have a solution, and one even contains dysfunctional turrets.
Mechanics:
Game Modes - single player, first person perspective puzzle game.
Portal gun - shoots blue and orange portals, you go through one you come out the other. However, there are only certain places you can shoot, usually whiter and more well-lit tiles. However, you do discover a white goo, made of moon rocks, that allows you to put a portal anywhere it's been painted.
Special goo - There's a few different types of goos that do different things. One's the white goo mentioned previously. There's a blue goo that propels you and is bouncy like a trampoline. There's an orange goo that's very slick and propels you forward like a slip n' slide.
Robot sentinels - These adorable little cyclops robots shoot you with lasers, but they don't really move, so as long as you stay away form the red lines/lasers, you're ok. Also you can pick one up and use it to shoot others, sometimes you can shoot a portal under one and make him fall to another area, sometimes you can form a laser bridge with portals that blocks it. At this point in the game, Wheatley places you in a room full of lasers that he thinks is a trap, but they are all defective.
Personality core bombs - Wheatley shoots personality core bombs at you that explode. So what you want to do is shoot a portal above him, and one where the bomb drops to, so that it flies through that portal and hits him.
Portals - One blue and one orange, doesn’t matter which one you go through, you will come out the other side. There are a few specific rules like the aforementioned only being able to shoot on specific surfaces, but also the laws of physics stay in tact. For example, if you shoot a portal in the ceiling, and one on the floor, you will drop at the same speed as if you fell from the ceiling. If the portal is on a wall and you step into it from the floor, you will fall at an arc, as if catapulted through the wall. Anyone can go through a portal once it is shot, which doesn’t matter as much for the single player game as it does the co-op. You can also shoot another portal anywhere while going through the first. For example, there’s a portal on the wall, and one on the ceiling. You can jump through the wall, and while falling, shoot a portal right underneath you and fall faster and faster over and over again, until you shoot another somewhere else and come flying through the new one. It sound complicated, but it’s actually quite easy once you pass a few levels.
The moon - it takes a while at first, but you have to pay attention to the audio. Cave Johnson, the original founder of Aperture, discovered that moon rocks react to the portal gun. However, it’s toxic effects slowly kills him. So when a panel of the ceiling suddenly gets shot off, and you see the moon, you’re supposed to shoot a portal on to the moon, and since the laws of physics remain in tact, you’ve suddenly created a vacuum that sucks everything up into space.
I'm loving the low poly look these days, and would love to make an environment that's low poly with highly saturated colors. But more importantly, it's doable with my current modeling skills. My favorite kind of environment is the post-apocalyptic future where the future already happened, and nature is taking over again. There's of signs of advanced technology, but you're not sure what it does, plus it's all covered in vegetation and moss. I'm going to try my best to combine these two ideas, and the class prompt, sci-fi industrial, into my level design. Here are some examples, and a low poly Maya tutorial. Simple level block to come.
sci-fi industrial theme
love these colors and low poly
sci-fi industrial look with plants
maybe some graffiti on the walls
like the retrofuturism feel
can't wait for this release, but totally love the post-apocalyptic tribalism thing
maybe some organic shapes, but lots of floaty platform things
again, sci-fi industrial but with organic shapes/objects
Tutorial for those interested in the low poly look. I guess most people are doing it in cinema 4D though, but not sure if I can put end results into unreal?
Here's a basic blocking from images provided in class
