I finally have feedback for my ideas:
“Hello Lloyds, your game ideas can all be made to meet the brief specifications. I would advise you to annotate some of the images to give more context to why they’re useful and important. I would also advise that you consider that as a hyper casual game should think about how the game might better fit a mobile console (more typically where hyper casual games are played). Please go ahead and pick a game idea and make the GDD”.
Platform choices:
The platform I’d make the game for is something I had thought about but not discussed before, almost all of my market research was on the mobile game market and whilst I imagined these games on mobile devices I thought it might complicate the project too much for playtesting and final porting. To me, ultimately hypercasual is a genre made defined mobile gaming and these ideas were formed with that platform in mind, I would like to but I’m uncertain if I will be able to make it so I will try to prototype and make the game with PC in mind then adapt a mobile port in the end. Looking through the documentation on testing and porting, it’s absolutely possible to develop the game with initially targeting the PC platform then try to port to mobile devices but in this process, I’ll need to design the games with that in mind.
For PC & mobile porting, I’ll have to make the games in landscape mode and provide mobile support with that in mind, I’ll have to keep optimisation in mind which is the bigger concern with mobile game ports as well as how the input method will change the feel of the game (there’s room to do extra fun stuff if I have extra time such as moving the water and ship with the phones tilt in the ship game.
Choosing an idea:
First, I want to really rate the difficulty as a glance at each idea, 1st is easiest and 4th is hardest.
- Capybara Spa
- Souls-Like
- Ship-Sim
- Planet-Hero
Capybara spa is a very basic idea, though a lot of its complexity would come from the additional ideas for the game. I forgot to consider that adding increasing complexity may make it less suited as hypercasual and it would need a level system which may not suit George’s specification for hypercasual having not much save data as well.
Souls-Like I feel would be next simplest with the sequence of functions called to create game, the most difficulty I see coming from setting up timings on the events where the enemy projects a left or right attack and the player has a window to move either left or right.
Planet Hero is my favourite idea, only concern is that there’s too many buttons provided to the player, I think a subtle guide would work where the button you need to press and the gauge you need to follow is highlighted while all other elements are dimmed out of the way – Either this or I remove a button from each set and the remaining buttons will be correct. I think this game will be much more challenging due to the setup: 60 second rounds, round setup t o load planet|temp|co2 instance, input to adjust temp then co2 then swap to next planet instance,
Ship Simulator has comparable difficulty to develop compared to planet-hero, I’ll have to have an event to call cannonball strikes and move the mast with a shortening timer. Player will want mouse-over checks to interact with the ship-events (patch holes, move water, adjust sail), ship tracks how much water is currently onboard, each hole rapidly adds more water to the ship, each time water is added the level is checked if it meets the gameover state.
These were the main notes I had in mind for the programming side these ideas, it’s hard to judge the difficulty fully while considering the ideas as the way I think development will go may be far from how it turns out. The ship sim and the planet games will be the hardest but I think their gameplay will be the best, and I’m siding more with the planet hero game as I like the concept the most. I still really like the souls-like idea and may make it as part of practicing C++.
I immediately figured that the buttons and gauges could be widgets, which would be difficult.
Next task in mind is to make the GDD and flowchart for the gameplay loop before I start to work on the game.