Open Season Beta

Author(s): Reyes Cisneros, Omar; Rosales, Lilianna | Abstract: Lilliana Rosales: For our final game project, my partner, Omar Reyes, and I created the a shooting game named Open Season. This game is considered a top down shooter game because of the view point of the player, we see the game from an above view. The main character of this game is a young orphaned deer. We drew our inspiration from the well known Disney animated film Bambi. This deer is now seeking revenge for the killing of his beloved family. The deer is killing each hunter one by one until it reaches the main hunter which was responsible for the brutal death of his dear family. The young orphaned deer travels alone from the forest, which is level one, through the highway against traffic, which is level two, all the way to the other forest to find the lead hunter, which is level three. In level one the main goal for the player as the deer is to kill all the hunters before they kill the deer and proceed to the next level. In the second level the goal for the deer is to avoid being hit by the cars coming toward it on the highway and kill at least one the two hunters before they kill you and proceed to the next level. The goal in the third and final level is to kill the hunters which are protecting the main hunter and win the game by killing the main hunter. If the deer can kill the main hunter without having to kill all of the other hunters it can also win. The deer is armed with a pistol and the hunters are armed with a shotgun. If the deer is shot it looses 50 health points per shot. If the deer kills a hunter it can collects 25 health points per hunter. The deer starts off with 600 health points. The hunters have to be shot 3 times in order to die. My partner and I choose this plot because it is so odd and kind of funny. Deers can't shoot people in real life. This game turns the tables of reality. Our game, Open Season, tries to appeal to the action type of Yee's gamer motivation profiles. Open Season uses guns and chaos which fall under destruction category and also uses action and trill which fall under the excitement category. Open Season can also appeal a small amount to the immersion type due to the plot and interesting character type which fall under the story category and it also bring someone else, somewhere else which is the fantasy category. Because of this, I think Open Season falls under the Action-Social cluster of the three clusters of motivations put together by authors. This is because of the excitement and destruction aspects of the game. Our game is all action playing with no narrative story interruptions. This makes the game a bit harder. As stated in lecture, the more story interruption there is the less difficult the game is. I consider this game to be somewhat difficult because of all the hunters shooting at the deer and the speed of the objects. I don't think I have ever heard of a game like the one we created. Of course there are many other games which are top view shooter games but not many with a deer as the main shooter. This makes our game unique and appealing. I consider our game to be innovative because of the fact that most if not all games that involve animals and shooting have a person or people shooting the animals, not the other way around like our game does. In our first play test, my partner and I were advised that some of the components of our game were a bit too hard to see. We were also told that some of the things were also a bit too fast which then made the game almost impossible to beat. For our next few play tests we were shown that our game needed a few more hard boundary in order for the deer to stay on the main page and be visible to the player. From these play tests we gathered information which helped us improve the game and develop the final game. In the final game we made the bullet which comes from the deer's shot gun a tad larger, slowed down the speed of the bullets coming from the hunters shot gun and provided boulders as boundaries. In addition to these things we also added two additional levels. In these two additional levels we tried to make sure that all of the elements were at an appropriate speed, such as the bullets and the cars on the highway. We also made sure the path in which the deer was expected to take was very much present. Omar Reyes Cisneros: The game my partner, Lilianna Rosales, and I created is a twist on hunting games, dubbed Open Season. Normally, the hunting games that are on the market depict a person hunting animals. With our game we wanted to do something less conventional, and have the people be the hunted for once. We took this idea, and added onto it. It started out as a lonely dear, looking for revenge, but turned into a gun wielding young buck out for blood. We both had a background in video games that involved shooting, so that is how we came up with the shooting aspect of our game. With this in mind we also wanted our game to have an 8-bit gameplay style, that the game Asteroids has. The end result is a top down shooter, where we move our deer around with the arrow keys, and shoot at stationary hunts-people with the spacebar. These hunts people only shoot when you get close enough because they are using shotguns. They think that grouping together will help them take down the meanest deer around, but that won't stop our protagonist from showing them who's boss. We wanted the game to look retro, and have basic controls that anyone can pick up and play. The HUD is very minimal, with only a health bar shown. We didn’t want to make this game about points because it would take away from just having fun. Our game is about having fun and not about achievements. In Open Season, we tried to instill some of the player motivation categories mentioned in class and our readings. We went with an immersion and action approach. Given more time and resources we would have made our game have more story involved. We wanted players to live out this fantasy of playing as a deer that was harmed by humankind. Our furry friend, grew sentient and capable, and the ability to use firearms. This is where the action comes in. Initially, we had the idea of giving our deer a full arsenal of weapons to use, but again with time and material constraints we decided to go with the classic pistol loadout. The action aspects embodies the gore and mayhem that is produced by our little deer taking its feelings out on the disrespective hunters. The immersion aspect plays out in the fantastical world we have created for our character to live out. Open Season, is innovative in the sense that not many games place you as the animal for the main character. Like I’ve explained, in hunting games it's mainly humans that are the hunters and animals that are hunted. As a kid, I played a lot of Cabela’s hunting games, so I drew some inspiration from that game in terms of what kind of game I wanted. Then that also got me thinking about games that I played growing up, like the original Grand Theft Auto. In the original GTA game, we only had a top down view to see the character and our actions. So we drew on these two games for inspiration. We went with a point and shoot mechanic, like in asteroids. Lastly, towards the end of production on Open Season, we found a game that somewhat embodies our game called Deer Avenger. Our game is similar in terms of the protagonist and the shooting aspect, but this game is too vulgar for our taste. Deer Avenger, depicts a deer shooting people who aren’t hunters, and there’s no reason to take out your anger on plain civilians. In our game, we are only after those who hurt our furry friends. During the initial playtest of our game, Open Season, we had people explain that it was a little difficult to see and play. The students mentioned that they could not see the bullets of the characters. This made it hard to see the mayhem that is going on. Secondly, they said that it was too hard to play because we had not tuned the character movement. We would accelerate slowly, but then move too quickly and not stop fast enough. We also hadn’t set hard boundaries for our games, so we easily lost track of the main character. In the beta play throughs we addressed these issues, as well as added more gameplay. During the beta playtest, we had someone mention that we didn’t have an indicator for how they were doing in-game. We explained that we didn’t want a point system and that we just wanted to play and shoot some hunters. Then the player gave us the idea of using a health meter to keep track of how we are doing. We are more worried about surviving than actually shooting all the hunters, that’s a plus. In the end we were able to produce a fun playable game for us, and that’s all that really mattered.