Design discussion nov 18, 2011

During this meeting we further discussed how we can develop our concept of aggression and pacifism. Here are some of the ideas we arrived at and some of the problems we discussed:

Problems:

• How do we communicate our concept to the player?
• How do we allow the player to learn the concept of changing enemy patterns based on how they play?
• How can we make it not feel so cheap?
• How should they shoot in order to make that work well with our concept?
• Should they constantly be shooting or not?
• Should the game award pacifism for hitting the circle?

Solutions:

(not in any order)

• Display a graph at the corner of the screen that shows their level of aggression and pacifism
• Our graph will change in real time showing the player as they perform actions how they affect the game.
• We may change the aesthetics to communicate each direction, but fade to gray for neutral.
• We award aggression to kills and shooting (more to kills) and award pacifism to not shooting.

Ideas:

• Our theme should be math and geometric. Complex equations like integrals and such should be the enemies. And most of entities should look like they weren't draw with pencil and rulers.
• To encourage staying with a particular side (aggression or pacifism) the player can hit bosses and mini-bosses along the way until they hit the maximum threshold of the side. At the end point they would have to defeat the final boss.
• All those bosses would be fought from that side's perspective. So there would have to be a non-violent way to defeat a pacifism boss. Maybe a chase?
• We should replace the circle with a weapon range because a pacifist player would rarely use the circle. But the aggressive player would still notice the weapon range restriction.

Ryan Badour