The Winter's Tale - A new game assignment
Here begins my second assignment of Game Design. This is considerably a bigger challenge than my solo development work on my 2D platform game Cax, considering that I have to work in a group of four to make a 3D Unity game.
Each group in our class has been assigned to create a 3D game using the Unity, and base the concept around one of the plays by William Shakespeare. In our group, we were assigned to adapt our game from The Winter's Tale. It tells the tragedy in the Sicilian Kingdom, where King Leontes imprisons his doubting wife Queen Hermione, and banishes his daughter into exile. This leaves Antigonus as the one to save the royal girl, and bring her to safety on the coast consumed with gold and jewels.
At the start of our project, we assigned ourselves into different roles of game development. These include:
Programming – Karl Smith (me)
Concept Art – Janet Lu
Narrative – Amy Chan
Game Design – Zach Fields
I took the big step to volunteer as the programmer of this project. Considering my computer science bachelor, as well as my past programming experience in that field and the Cax game in the previous assignment, it would be idea that I would go upon possibly the most challenging task of the development. My role as the game programmer is to create the base cod of the game, which involes combining the created assets with my C# coding to build on the functionality and life of the game. Essentially, code is the lifeblood of a video game, because there would be no interactivity in a computer program without batches of code.
Our first big step was the think of how to adapt a Shakespeare play into a 5-minute video game. When looking in the events that happen in The Winter's Tale, drama takes up the majority of it, action scenes are nearly non-existent. However, there was one scene that we found could work in in the form of a video game that could not only provide an entertaining interactive experience to players. In one of Shakespeare's most famous stage directions, Antigonus is killed by a bear after leaving the baby girl on the coast. We believed we could use that notable scene to create a game out of it.
Antigonus being chased by the bear.
[Painting by Thomas Bragg (source), released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.]
We intend to tell the story up to that point through still cut scenes, showing King Leontes going crazy, and the average man Antigonus who must deal with abandoning a baby though the King's demands. Once the cut scene is completed, the game begins, and the player must escape from the bear. The ending of the game has two possible outcomes: Either Antigonus escapes the bear and is free to care the baby, or he is killed by the greed of the bear.
With out limited development schedule and experience with 3D game-making, we took inspiration from 2D and 3D platform games like Crash Bandicoot, Rayman and Mario, as well as mobile games like Temple Run, and Subway Surfers. These titles have simple game mechanics that are easy to pick up and play without a steep learning curve, as well as basic storytelling to help us easily understand the setting and situation. Since the gameplay can be set up in Unity with ease, this can make us benefit with a lot of game testing to determine which ideas work in the game and which ones don't.
