Suit and Telephone

For our next project we were assigned to make a space shooter game in five weeks. More or less.

We have the restrictions that the game must fulfill which is as follows;

• No Gravity. The game shall not contain elements that an additional force needs to be programmed. So jumping can’t be a feature in the game, yet walking up and down is allowed.
• The game needs to be played on PC.
• It needs to have 2D Graphics.
• Can be produced within 10 weeks.
• The game must contain some kind of projectile, and at the least 3 different kinds of power-ups.
• High score. A score system.
• The game scene which can either scroll together with the player, move from room to room, or just be one scene and the enemies comes to you.
• The game must contain the two key words given in some way.

That’s the requirements. Today our group sat down to come up with a concept for the game. The key words we were given was “Suit” and “Telephone”. In 2 and a half hour we sculptured a concept for narrative, levels and their basic features, aesthetics, key feature, and ideas for power-ups.

The game we came up with centers around “Telephone” and is more of a comical exploration game. In fact, it even has Bell himself in it. I’m not going to explain the actual narrative of the game, much rather how the game works. The game progress from level to level. Where each level is built up by moving from scene-to-scene. You can walk rather freely around the scene. Up, down, left, right. You are only restricted by certain obstacles like house walls, crowds and such. Every scene has one entry and one exit, moving from left to right. Enemies and power-ups will rain down from right to left on each scene, going against the character. The character is hurt if touched by the enemies, and the character can shoot them to make way to get forward to get to the goal. Each level has different outer forces instead of just the enemies, making the player have to keep an eye on the surroundings as well. As an example, if there is a war going on in the level. The player needs to watch out for bombs and bullets. Each level has a time limit which will determine your score together with enemies shot. That is the basic of the game.

Next time I’ll maybe get into the game setting and what it is about, and how we included suits and telephones.