Game Design Document for GoHome

The Beginning of a Game Design Document Coggle

Project Plan for Go Home

Intro to game: Mood and Asset requirements-

Rhythmic, Moody music (free) from Unity Asset store
Opening screen view with depth of field interest, modulated colors, mystery.

Gameplay Assets-

2-D or 3-D (?) “Map” of the world and route.

Travelling Sound Effects, atmospheric changes sounds (aural passage of time)
Assets Artwork: various scenes in distance- (mis)leading traveler in homeward direction.
Visual details that confirm direction.
Moving Objects that interfere?

text: [Flimsy story line instilling a sort of unease or urgency to find your way home
in the least number of moves possible.]

Rules: X, Y movement of player
Scorekeeping: number of moves recorded in game

Left out for future builds: 3-D-ification?

1 Like

loading screen

  • with cartoon drawn dog, question mark over his head and a home in the distance surrounded by multiple homes
  • text title “Go Home!”
  • text subtitle “Press any Key to play (no idiot, there is no “ANY” key, just press a ****** key”… humour

Assets (in game):

  • a grid displayed on the ground
  • a dog picture that is POV with just the nose visible
  • a directional red arrow mix (left, right, up, down)
  • 10 different house designs
  • a “welcome home” explosion sign
  • a home with a green roof top (your home)

Sound effects:

  • random barks and sneezes
  • the sound “Raggy?” – from Scooby Doo
  • a dogs feet running
  • an excited dog sound (tail wagging, breathing hard) - this is the waiting for a move sound
  • a dog yippy’ing loudly (when he finds his home)
  • a sun
  • some clouds

Rules:

  • click red arrow moves 1 “block” on the grid in that direction
  • a vector is displayed to your house above the red arrows, this indicates the vector you should be traveling in
  • each step increments a counter. the counter totals the number of steps to get to the home
  • when the dog arrives at any grid square that is adjacent to the correct house, the game is won
1 Like

Wow - I am really new at this so I’m seeing the other replies and thinking I’m way out of my league!! But here’s my crack at it:
ASSETS

  • a person (the player) - 3D?
  • environmental assets, e.g. trees, things around the player
    SOUND EFFECTS
  • depends on the atmosphere you want to create. My vision is someone lost in the bush so lots of animal, bush noises.
    ARTWORK
  • yes, will need a forest/bush screen/layer
    LEAVE OUT
  • will be keeping it simple so not worrying about wider atmosphere stuff like sun, moon, etc. Really not sure!
2 Likes

Assets - Home, beacon, player, box and script, environment
Sound Effect - Daft Punk would be cool, but theme music and victory note when arriving home.
Artwork - Low resolution 3D and words. Player avatar, house, road
Features left out - Everything but text to learn

Sprites, music, coding.

Sprites:
Arrows
path
start
house

Music:
start
game
finish

code:
I have no idea…

Plan for Go Home:

ASSETS
-A construction site
-Machinery
-Site office

SOUND
-None

ARTWORK
No idea

FEATURES
No idea

Assets: some sort of visual reference that represents the player, like a hand holding the distance beacon, such as in FPS games where you can see just your hands. Unless its a text based game which just replies with a distance answer each time you make a directional decision.

Sound: no sound for now, focusing on basic programming to start, inclusion of audio files comes later

Artwork: basic ground and wall textures, screen text interface for use of beacon device and list of turns taken

Features left out: World objects, non playable characters

Project Plan – Go Home
Assets: 2D Cartoon figures of character, landscape, and home
Sound Effects: Music, Footsteps, Winning Sound
Artwork: Simple 2D drawings
What features will I leave out?: NONE

Loading Screen
Maybe some homes away with a question mark over one of them
and some indications like “Press the magnet clicker to start”

Assets

  • some 3d homes from scartch or pray for one in the unity assets
  • make a diferent routes or 3d roads
  • design some buttons for choose in what direction you wanna go

Sound effects
footstep sound
sad music from the beginning?
I’m stuck Ignore

rules

  • the player will choose the way he thinks is right, ex: to the left, right, go straight, etc
  • each movement direction increase the steps by one
  • the best score is the lowest
    -the player wins when he gets go home (ba dum tss)

I’m partial to sci fi and fantasy, so I thought I’d put a spin on the go home idea. Maybe the VR user is a ship pilot that’s been set off course after a battle, and his or her nav unit is offline or not working to max capacity. He or she is trying to find his way through the void of space back to civilization.

I also thought it would be a neat idea to possibly have a hint option. Perhaps, every now and then (and a limited number of times), the nav unit gains some temporary functionality, where the user can attempt to put a lock on home"s direction.

In addition, a hard mode would put a time limit on the user. Perhaps the ship is damaged and life support is failing? Or perhaps the user travels by brief bursts of hyperspace entry, and with each use of the hyperdrive, the ship’s limited power drains.

With that in mind, I’d need:


Assets:

  • Ability/text to show the faulty nav unit’s displays: distance to home, direction, life support or hint status, etc. Code would need to keep track of these things.
  • Buttons for direction, movement, and hint controls.
  • Added functionality for hard mode. Additional code for time limit, etc.

Sound Effects:

  • Sounds to acknowledge button presses, movement, or a hint coming online
  • Possible music? There may be some free resources available.

Artwork:

  • The plane’s control displays or cockpit
  • Smattering of stars, space-like environments
  • An image of home when the user finds it, could be a planet or a friendly dreadnought/station

Features left out:

  • I thought a voice of the ship’s AI would be neat to have, but not necessary for the time being. Also getting a decent voice actor (or necessary software to edit the voice) might not be plausible at this stage!
  • There could be the possibility of adding objects. Meteors, debris, enemies. Given the advanced nature of having to fight off or avoid enemies, or the increased asset requirement (what with more damage displays, the possibility of being thrown off course, or other such factors), I decided not to include this in the first version of the game.
  • Online leaderboards. Perhaps users can just manually compare their scores for the time being.
  • Cooperative or competitive play. Seeing who can reach home faster?
1 Like

This sounds pretty cool. Do you have plans to build it, or just putting something out there for the course? I am tempted to build a Go Home Concept game for the experience. Something not too complex for a first game, but fun. An opportunity to see what all goes into building a game, although it would be a relatively small project.

Maybe at some point when I have the aptitude I will. :slight_smile: Who knows, maybe after the course it will be possible? I was going to keep my GDD simple but had so much fun with following the trails of my imagination, I ended up just allowing myself to be overly ambitious. By the time I was done, I was so enamored with the idea that I figured, I might as well share.

If you decide to make or start your own Go Home game it’d be awesome to see it!

I hear ya, I have a lot to learn as well :slight_smile: I can fully relate, the GDD I did here was almost nothing but I’ve been working on a different GDD. It is so easy to get lost in just writing. Lots of fun :slight_smile:

I’m glad you did share. There are so many different directions one could go with the Go Home concept. Your idea is better than what I had because seated in a space craft is a far better experience than running around in VR, with the Gear VR, and at the time of writing no methods for getting a full body experience. :slight_smile:

I found a new tool for the GDD, and planning in general. It’s called hacknPlan. I signed up just yesterday and I’m liking it a lot.

Thanks, I might decide to make my own Go Home game at some point. I still have to finish this course and, when available, I’m planning on enrolling in Udacity’s Nanodegree program for VR Development. I’m kind of an old guy but need (want) a change of employment.

I’ve been spending some time with the Go Home game, course version, and pseudo code. I have actually gone back to the beginning of the course and I see there is an entire section that either I missed, or has been updated. It is helping to watch it.

I’m attempting to learn Flowgorithm so I can write the Go Home game in pseudo code, which will create a flowchart and aid with visualization. It may be far too fundamental for many people but I like to see how this will flow, which segments of the game has flow control, see where the individual functions will be called, etc. I think once I get this going, then the actual coding will be easier for me. Have you worked with pseudo code?

Thanks for the resources. I’ll have to check out HacknPlan. Now that I’m getting into VR I definitely need to check out Udacity’s VR course. I didn’t realize they had one. That’s exciting!

Pseudo code makes it easy for me to plan. I have ADHD so being able to visualize code beforehand, and to plan out a program, allows me to keep tabs on where I’m at and keep my thoughts in order. So it’s a big part of how I work. I also grew up with a leaning towards art and illustration, so I find being able to visualize things makes the process easier and a lot more comfortable for me. :smiley:

You’re welcome, yes, I’m also very excited about the upcoming VR Nanodegree. For those looking for employement in that space, it might be just the way to get a foot in the door. At the very least, the knowledge and skill gained should be really good.

Since you are already using pseudo code maybe you can help me out. I only just discovered pseudo code recently, and as a result of listening to this course. I am stuck trying to figure out how to get input from the keyboard into the pseudo code and flowchart. The flowchart is not static, the user can interact with it and step through the processes.

I am trying to bind WASD user inputs to the flow diagram but not seeing how to do it. Of course, when it comes to the programmer actually coding, it would be (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.S)), for example and using the letters WASD respectively. Have you ran into this problem?

The pseudo code software has been a big help. It lets me work with Statements like Input, Output, Declare, Assign, If, Call, While, For and Do. I don’t know if I need to learn a lot more than that, but for now it seems to be the tools needed for what I’m learning in the course. All without coding just yet.

It sounds like your mind might work in a similar fashion. It is so helpful to see the overall picture, then the general flow of control, and lastly the coding.

Go Home for me will be an ant that moves around as required.

I need simple boxes to block out initially, i will decide what to swap with later on in more detail, but the objects will be big as we are playing from an ants pov, this actually might effect the rendering and post effects as we all agree ants won’t see the word like us humans right? :slight_smile:

Audio: Scratching sounds , far background music?!! not sure, may be just some wired sounds!

Artwork will be any kinda UI stuff along with the splash screen and logo

more locomotion features , i love teleporting in VR! may be an spider that can teleport around by throwing web!

gohome gdd

a loading screen with ghosty arround palyer

assets:
2d cartoon figure of char, buildings and home

sound:
scary voice, footstep etc

Hey, sorry about the late response. I just moved, so things have been hectic!

I’m not sure I fully understand the question, but in psuedo code for user input I generally just put something simple like: “get user input for direction”. Then something like:

if key is w
move forward
if key is a
move left…
else don’t move

That sort of thing. It’s however you’d expect the computer to need to handle it, just in shorthand where you can get the gist of what’s required in your head to begin with.

  • Assets in game
    -Faint grid on ground showing spaces
    -Textures on ground (pavement/road)
    -Effects to confirm movement of player
    -Fog effects
    -Buildings (abandoned small town so run down stores and houses)
    -Directional arrows
    -Move counter (score)

  • Loading Screen
    -Title of game “Go Home”
    -Loading bar
    -button to start game - text “You should be on your way”

  • Sound effects
    -Loading music ( cuts abruptly when player clicks the button to start the game)
    -Atmospheric music (quiet to maintain creepy atmosphere)
    -Occasional heavy breathing from the player
    -Distant Screams
    -Loud footstep sounds when moving (emphasises area’s quiet)

  • Left out
    -NPCs

Privacy & Terms