In Farmageddon, you are Farmer Pete, and
Martians have invaded your farm and wreaked
havoc all over the darn place. They also kidnapped your wife, Petunia
and let all your livestock loose. I hate Martians. Now you get to run
through the mess left behind to gather up your stuff (chicken eggs,
chickens, piggies, and more), get rid of the Martian invader hordes, and
find your beloved Petunia. You can also play Petunia, and play to
rescue Pete (go casual gamer female demographic, go!) Along the way you
find some pretty cool power-up gizmos and do-hickeys that the stupid
Martians leave all over the place. Sometimes you need to get through the
Martians to get the cool gizmos. You are armed with your trusty spade,
which you can use to dig holes to trap the Martians or get to
hard-to-reach areas, slide down ropes or whack Martians over the head,
yeah! If you're lucky you'll get your hands on some Martian RayGuns.
Sadly, the Martians self-destruct when you whack 'em, so you'll have to
figure out how to get their RayGuns for yourself.
Tech Notes:
Farmageddon is a side view (non-scrolling) 2d
platformer. The idea is to re-create Lode Runner, in which you run around
picking up things and avoiding bad-guys by digging holes that they fall
into. The holes fill up over time, buring who ever is in them. Bummer. But
you and the baddies respawn etc. After you pick up all the tokens, the
escape to the level appears, and you need to avoid the baddies to get
there and escape. I will be doing all that and more.
One key game play element is "adaptive
terrain". You get to mess with the maps with your spade, ray guns etc. And
the map will adapt accordingly (stuff will fall down). I also want the
player to be able to expose new aspects of the map by destroying or
altering what is there upon load.
The other feature I will have is a
graphical level editor, to build my levels, and allow players to
build their own custum levels. Sort of a mod feature
there.
I don't plan any multi-player version
right now, but I plan to have all the basic game elements, like splash
screen, menu, editor level loads and saves and testplay. I might even let
the players save a game in-progress, but I haven't decided for sure
on that one. Perhaps that violates casual (arcade style) game experiences.
??? I dunno.
References:
I want to point out some great reading
materials I found. These helped me work out my Game design, and I will be
using them for Level Design as well.