GDD

Typestroid Game Design

Big Picture:

MMORPG

Shoot asteroid by typing words
Base building
Team based gameplay

Core Game Idea:

A casual multiplayer game (like Minecraft) where players login, shoot down asteroids to mine resources, then use those resources to build a base.

Rares materials can be found the further away they go from the base, but the world gets harsher as they proceed.
They need to craft/build things inorder to venture out in the “deeper space”
Each player will spawn in a different world, but they can join someone elses world by using their code.
Later on, warps can be created to allow players to go back and forth without their permission (for raid/trade)

Challenges Ideas:

Air hockey 1v1, asteroid when shot changes direction, if it reaches the opposite side you loose (like four words)
Endless defence (solo like v4) , asteroids come towards you from different direction shoot them to not die
Io game, spawn in different positions in the map, shoot asteroids to score highest before time runs out

V0.0.4

What was v0.0.4?

A mobile game where astroids come at you
You need to shoot astroids down before they kill you
A challenging game, where as time goes on the game gets more difficult, and eventually you loose

Playtest 1:

from the play test I did with friends, I found out that, I am focusing too much on difficulty of the game, why not let the the placers decide the pace they want to play the game at in the start, make the asteroids idle and let them shoot it down as fast as they want to clear the area... that is a much better design, than the design we are using now (we can do that later in some challenge mode)

Maybe, we can reward them for clearing asteroid faster but not punish them so hard when they fail to do so, it might be fine for a completive game to do that, but for casual player its just immersion breaking…

One thing I noticed in all players was that, they were immersed in the game until they died, and as soon as they did die, they lost the interest in the game.

What did we do wrong

Base core idea of the game should be very simple, initially during v3 it was very simple, but it didn’t play good because of the lack of smart controls which made the game feel janky. V4 did fix that but, the complicated difficulty system ruined its simplicity. From what we saw players were engaged to the gameplay loop while it was running, but as soon as they died, they lost the interest, so basic loop of the game i.e. shooting the asteroids by typing is fun.

How can we use v0.0.4?

So as we know v4 had its issues, even though it had some great ideas to calculate difficulty and stuff, but it doesn’t mean we can’t use it. Later on, we can create challenge games which players can play to earn some reward at the end, like group maps or solo challenges.

V0.0.5

What do we want in v0.0.5?

Version 5 will create the core of the game, on top of which other features will be added on.

Web based game where people can login and start playing
They can shoot asteroids and collect its resources
Other player can join them to help them out with their grind
They can use those resources to build structures/craft items

Problems we see in v5 design.

For start, there wont be much to do apart from just shooting the asteroids, so what will they do to use the resources?

Information Dump:

Difficulty Scaling:
(this feature is postposed but dumping existing writeups jic I need it later)

Better Difficulty scaling:

aims to improve upon basic difficulty scaling #15

instead of taking in the time to destroy astroids, we can simply use wpm (5 character = 1 word) as an input and update parameters with different weights for difficulty

there will be 1 difficulty_value will be calculated which will change different parameters using weights

different weights can be used for different game modes to keep the games interesting

eg, spawn_rate = difficulty_value * spawn_weight

ML based difficulty scaling:

ultimate difficulty scaling, based upon basic difficulty scaling #15 and better difficulty scaling

Reward Function

score for the sytem: number of near misses by players (how many times in a play session did the player almost lost but kept playing, can be used as reward function for ml based AI)

Inputs

players typing speed

distance of the destroyed astroid from the player

Outputs

spawn tick time
word length probability distribution
spawn location (close/far, left/right)

Events

spawns spawn word behind big words at the nick of time to make player with small probability ( as a second wind moment ) cant do this very often else, players will find out that its scripted

visual enhancement:

asteroid destroy effect
asteroid trail

moving/parallax background
shoot effect
shoot laser glow

fixed level system:

instead of random words, fixed words will be used in order with maybe fixed time intervals

instead of fixed time intervals,
it can be scaled according to difficulty or wpm