Monday, October 26, 2009

Game Overview

Inspirations

300 Movie
Our game theme and story was firstly inspired by “300” movie. This movie is about an epic battle between the Persian Empire Army led by Kind Xerex I and the allied forces of Greek Cities. The Greece side had about 7,000 warriors where the Persian Empire believed to have millions. King Leonidas and his army of 300 Sparta tried to stand the attack of Persian Emperor at Thermopylae which they believed was the only gate the Persians could get through. The movie is very good and we were inspired by the way Sparta brave warriors fought. So we decided to use them as the hero units of our game.

Lord of the ring (Return of the king)
I am sure that everybody will remember the final movie of LOTR series. In the movie, there is a part where Aragon go and meet with fallen worriers (an army of death who promised to serve the people when fighting with darkness but fail to serve and cursed to became ghosts). The idea of zombie army came from this part. We thought what if the Persian Army faced by Sparta in Battle of Thermopylae was not built with human warriors but summoned dead zombies instead. And we realized that could be a cool IP to implement in our own game. Of course our zombies are not green and see through as we model it ourselves to get a new type of zombie.

Tower Defense Games
The basic game play idea came from frozen throne campaign maps. Tower Defense games. The concept is, there will be list of enemies that crawl up using certain track to the destination area. The user has to stop the enemies by using towers that fire up certain spells and attacks. So we change the idea a bit. Unlike the real-time tower defense games, we’ll make a turn-based tower defense game which we believe is easier to implement. We let the player forces to freely move around and battle with AI enemies.

Background Story

480BC
Thermopylae
The game will be set in 480 BC, Thermopylae. The era during the Persian Empire was trying to conquer all parts of Greece and Sparta. Only a small allied force of roughly 7000 men marched to block the pass. As the allied force looked upon the Persian host, they realized that the Persians used black arts to summon undead to boost its army strength. It was a host of Persians Zombies!

Objective
A tile based tactics strategy game about Spartans and Persian Zombie Army (PZA). The basic objective is to prevent the PZA from killing all your troops or pushing through your lines.

Using limited set of resources, the player will have to survive seven days of PZA attack. And also the player must make sure that they slay all the enemies and prevent them from passing through the battle field and going into your side.
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Game Design Document History

Though we've so many things to tell you about this project, we don't have much time to post them as today is the last day to upload the GDD on web. Here's a brief history of those GDD we've released and description of this final GDD.

Version 0.1
The original design document features several units and different abilities. Including hoplites, Toxotais, Phalanx each with different movement patterns and attack ranges.

Version 0.2
The second version includes designs on UI elements and game-play features. We removed the Phalanx unit and also made the movement pattern and attack range same for all the units after realizing that all those features are not possible to implement in time and so we had to cut the craps. Now the only different features in units are their HP, attack and defense values.

Version 1.0
This is the final GDD of our project assignment. This version includes all the features we’re going to implement into our game. We cut all the features which cannot be done in time and will try to tweak the mechanic values to make the game more challenging.

This final version of GDD can be downloaded here.
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Friday, October 23, 2009

Introducing Team Members

We've currently 8 members in our team. We all are from Myanmar/Burma.
My name is Aung Sithu Kyaw and I'm the team lead of Mahar Studios. I've been in the game industry for over a year (though I started learning game programming about 6 years ago).
Mr.
Wathan is a math geek and also good at Maya. He's currently the art lead in our team.
The other members and their respective roles are as follow:

Mr. Kyi Maw Han - Scripting, GFXs
Mr. Maung Ko Oo - GFXs, Research
Mr. Thant Thura Myo - Game Design, Documentation, Scripting
Mr. Ye Aung - GFXs, Scripting
Ms. May Phyo Lin - GFXs, Scripting
Ms. Kay Thwet Soe Lwin - GFXs, Scripting

The above list is just to address the specific role of each team member. Actually, we all involve in every discussion about the project. The successful completion of every project depends heavily on the contributions of all the members in the team.

We'll tell you what we've been working on in past few weeks sooner.

Cheers
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Thursday, September 17, 2009

Kick Off

This blog will be served as the development diary of our game design project assignment. For now we can't tell you much about the complete idea what its gonna be. But it'll be a turn-based strategy game featuring different units, abilities and multiplayer game play.

This blog will be updated as we have progress. Please be sure to come back and check out.

Thanks
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