Design discussion nov 25, 2011

During this meeting we further discussed the theme and progression of the game.

Problems:

• How do we transition the game towards aggression or pacifism?
• Should the game constantly work towards the end or should there be the choice to work towards one or the other; give up and go the other way?
• Our math theme isn't really a good mesh with our concept of Aggression and Pacifism.

Solutions:

(not in any order)

• Instead of a strictly math theme with the player's ship being a triangle we could represent the player as a hand. Shooting would be firing erasers and our enemies would be homework problems. To play pacifistically you would solve home work problems.
• Each "stage" of the game has a set of enemy spawns that loop. The stage specifies at how much "aggression points" or "pacifism points" it takes to start the stage. We then chain stages together, and completion is defined by reaching the next stage's point requirement.

Ideas:

• Direct the player along of "tree" of stages. When they end a stage by playing a certain way they go to the one of the two children of the stage. Eventually leading the last row of stages, the end.
• Instead of a predefined tree, each stage transitions to another stage based on the playstyle of the player. If aggressive the next stage is pulled from a pool of aggressive style stages, and so. In the end there are a couple predefined bosses for how the player has completed stages so far, either aggressive or pacifism or somewhere in between.
• Define a pool of stages for each way to play them, and a number of boss stages.
• Some enemies are polynomial equations that when destroyed turned into their derivative. Some enemies could be e^x which can't be destroyed because it turns into itself.

Ryan Badour