Project Description

Jurassic Arena is a unilateral competitive game with two gun-wielding Amazonian warriors versus a single Dinosaur that summons other dinosaurs to aid him (we also call him the Wizard Lizard).  DinosWGuns consists of three people, me, David and Cole. I worked on designing some of the concepts within the game, recording updates, sound design as well as concept art for characters; color palette and environment (map layout) and also structuring the map in Unity. Cole was in charge of modeling and animations, but mainly worked on prototyping player controls and AI movements. David was our main producer and game designer and focused on balancing values, programming player shooting and mob spawning. The game takes place in the once bustling colosseum that is now just empty ruins, but two guardian spirits stand vigilant by The Gate, the exit to the second realm. The Wizard Lizard wants to get past them and his plan to swarm them both with his powerful undead army, will the two warriors be consumed? Or will they prevail with great pride of their origins?

What went right

Our concept was easy to follow at because our game's main theme was a contrast between technology (but not to the spectrum of sci-fi) and primitive elements. Therefore, we imagined something like dinosaurs and Amazonian gun-wielding warriors, something Cole was inspired by from Kung Fury. Cole made prototypes of player controls and features and from there we played around with values especially with player movement. By the end of the second week, I finished concepting the Amazonian warrior character and the Wizard Lizard (a.k.a Dino Boss), as well as an axe that served as the warrior's secondary weapon. For the upcoming third week, I worked on sketching out an arena map, drastically changing where the Dino Boss would spawn mobs from. In the prototype, mobs where being spawned from different points surrounding the space in the camera's viewpoint. Moving the mob spawn points to surround the Dino Boss like an entourage made more sense thematically and fixed an issue of UI clarity for the player to choose a spawn point and the spawn; the new change would not require this. At first, I was a little iffy on 2.5D, but did my best to make it work environment-wise and aesthetically. This meant rearranging or even removing some structures within the map layout for visual clarity, one of the main feedbacks we got from playtests, and playing with lighting, color palette and particles. Cole and David did a great job creating contrasting guns that would allow for different playstyles and Cole modeled dinosaurs and characters that fit with the game's aesthetic, which was sort of low-poly, or cubic-style (using only rectangular prisms and cubes). David worked well as a producer, keeping us up to task despite our goals changing with each week as the deadline neared closer.

What went wrong

Although we had a solid theme, that didn't necessarily mean we had a solid concept. In fact it changed around 3 times  until we got to a concept that we stuck with which was this sort of single player versus single player MOBA arena game where both players had normal skills and then one ultimate ability. However, nearing the 3rd week, we took a lot of this away and change the gameplay drastically. This was especially the case with the Dino Boss where we changed all his abilities to summoning dinosaur mobs (before, summoning dino mobs was just one of his skills). With the Amazonian warrior, this was where we took away this idea of being able to utilize many different guns with a switch of a button on the controller and instead took one of the guns and put it on another gunner player. So after this we had two Amazonian warriors wielding a gun and a Big dinosaur that spawned other dinosaurs. Three weeks is a lot of time we could have spent working and refining this concept if we had got to it faster, but I guess thats the beauty of game design in which ideas are everchanging. It was also on us since David and I spent the first week concepting and brainstorming procedures rather than prototyping these ideas that were obviously too big. It was thanks to Cole that we had some sort of prototype on the second week. Also from the start, we should have thought within our limitations. It was my mistake for thinking too largely and not having a plan of attack to tackle the ideas. 

What I’ve learned

Time management wasn't a huge issue this time around. I feel like the team approached the tasks efficiently despite goals changing every week since we were still able to pull through with a revised concept (a concept that went through many revisions). The problem was that we had thought too big and did not think within our limitations, which was about 4 weeks for this project but I'm also speaking about our own coding skills. I'm still glad we were able to finish the project and thats thanks to combined efforts of everyone of the team.

Future Goals

From the feedback we received in last week's playtest, there is obviously more room for improvement and the possibility of additional features in the game. For example, things like environmental changes like holes or falling rocks was something we thought of if we made other maps, which would definitely be something we'd love to work on. One of the playtesters mentioned things like a dash, or other skills for the gunners to have since currently they can only shoot. With that we also thought of powerups or some sort of resource on the map that had to be unlocked to occur. Perhaps we could also add new characters that might be featured in the game through a character select screen. The possibilites are endless Mr. Wizard Lizard.