Bird Game
3 people | 4 weeks
Responsibilities :
Game Design : Initial design. Rapid prototyping to figure out if the technical challenges of the concept were within scope.
Coding : Bird player controller, enemy hunting and flocking AI behavior (Boids), dialogue system.
Animation : Animation state machine for bird controller.
Playtesting : Playtests for completion and understandability.
My first step was rapid prototyping to figure out the most natural input methods and expected affordances of the design of the bird controller.
Final gameplay footage
Doing a skill atom diagram helped break down the various controls by examining what feedback came from each specific action to the player. This helped further refine the understandablity of the controls by adding feedback where it was needed.
Skill atom diagram
I made an RGD (Rational game design) diagram to use math to analyse the difficulty curve of the Boid-based flocking enemy AI. I did this by changing various paramaters of the AI such as behavior, quantity, turning speed.
This helped me refine the gameplay by discovering the specific combination of lowering the enemy birds turning speed and raising the maximum forward speed to be faster than the player. This made for gameplay in which the player is using their smaller more agile bird to turn quickly and avoid the faster large birds who take longer to turn.
Rational game design diagram