Designing the Design Document

Greetings everybody,

This week was a busy week for ThunderStruck Games. The design document for Space Hawk is almost done and so begins the next portion of our game: the coding. A couple of important things in preparation for the coding were done this week: we set up our SVN Repository and we set up the class structure for Space Hawk.

Thursday we had an awesome workshop about implementing particles in a game. Since Space Hawk is going to be a game featuring a lot of bullets, exploding spacecraft’s etc. this workshop will come in very handy.

Friday Manuel Kerssemakers from Abbey Games was the host of a lecture about his experience in making games. We learned a lot about the ups and downs of teamwork, how to exploit the strengths of your team members and much more.

This weekend everyone from ThunderStruck Games will be working hard on Space Hawk!

Oh yeah I almost forgot. Here we present you the design document for our game. We will use it as a guide throughout the entire development process.

Design Document[.pdf]

See you next week!

Maarten

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Site under construction

Dear visitors,

this weekend, we will update the site with a new layout. In the meanwhile, there will be parts of the website that are not relevant to our project or team. Please bear with us as we upgrade the site.

- ThunderStruck team

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Introduction to Galaga

Greetings everyone

This introductory post is the first in a weekly series where we will provide you with a short synopsis of the development progress. Code-named 'Space Hawk', we are here to present you what-will-be our re-make of Gaplus, a successor to a once popular game called Galaga. Gaplus was developed by Namco. They tried to improve upon game you might have heard of called Space Invaders. Whether they succeeded or failed is not for us to decide, but we do think the Galaga series offers exactly what we want to try and do with our game: dodging bullets and killing enemies.

Despite its archaic graphics and game design, we think that Gaplus, as the only one in the Galaga series, succeeded in providing fast and engaging gameplay throughout. However, AI patterns are very predictable and the types of threats the player is faced with is sort of limited. Enemies in Gaplus can sometimes drop power-ups or ship parts that the player can use to gain an advantage, yet there isn't much variety. With all this in mind, you can see why Gaplus was a great game during its time, but lacks quite a bit in our time. That's where we step in.

In our remake you can expect an improved AI and more varied patterns. We will also rework the level system a little bit to provide you with faster gameplay and more challenging boss encounters. Part of more modern games is the ability to progress the player with customization options and we want to do some akin to a shop or garage to allow you to improve your ship as you progress through the levels. Other than that, we will of course update the graphics and sound to today's standard, but the exact details we will still have to figure out. We are also not yet sure if we should use the same theme (bug-like aliens) or if we can derive a little bit.

In the meanwhile, have a look at the following video of Gaplus to give you a better idea what game we will be remaking.

To round things off for this introductory post, we want to remind you that the name Space Hawk is just a name we use internally until we come up with something final. But who knows, maybe it sticks.

See you next week!
- the Thunder Struck team

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Meetings and Scrap

At this very moment, we are actually in a meeting, while I am writing this blog. It is the third meeting, and we are discussing how we are going to design the game. Types of weapons, gameplay, AI, upgrading, everything is being discussed.

Prepare for a game with bosses, scrap, secondary weapons, and a lot of scrap. There is a lot that we are talking about, and are discussing. The discussion can get quite heated, and it's quite exciting. The only thing that we actually have at the moment is a logo, but figuring out what parts we should implement in the game is really interesting and in my opinion a lot of fun. 

We can already tell you that we have a few things that we won't implement in the game, although it passed some minds this meeting. For example, we won't have a crossbow ability available, same goes for a mole rat.

For now, I'll focus on the meeting, and let this blog what it is.

Cya later,

Timon

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