Game Concept

3 years ago by QF123

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Working title:

Crazy Food Delivery

Game Concept:

Ben is a programmer. He gets a part-time job in a food delivery company. Now he needs to deliver food by using a motorcycle. Foods need to be delivered to customers on time in order to make customers satisfied and get paid. However, it is not easy to do food delivery in this area. He needs to overcome lots of difficulties to deliver foods safely. Hope you can help him!

Genre or category of the game:

Sports game

Sports video game is a kind of game that simulates a particular kind of sport. Different levels in this video game are similar to different levels of motorcycle trials. So, it could be regarded as a sports game.

Concept creation process/area and influences.

The concept of this game comes from Need for Speed 3, Hot Pursuit. Hot Pursuit is one of the earliest sport video games I am familiar with since I start playing games at five years old. I was impressed by this game deeply so I would like to create a motor racing game for young children. Even though Hot Pursuit is a perfect sports/racing game, it is not 100% suitable for young children. When I was playing this game, I found it is much more difficult to control the car than those flash games I played before. The first reason is the physics engine is NFS is realistic. For example, the front-wheel-drive car may be understeering if the player makes a turn at a fast speed and the rear-wheel-drive car may be oversteering in the same circumstance. Such kinds of physical properties cannot be understood by young children so it will definitely increase the game difficulty. To make the game playable by the young, subtractive design and minimalism were used in the game concept creation process to minimize unnecessary parts from NFS to make the game as simple as possible. So rather than creating a 3D game, I prefer to do a 2D game to get rid of x-axis control. Players only need to control the motorcycle to move forward, backward and rotation in this game, which is much easier than NFS. In addition, cops in NFS was another game setting that I was not happy with it when I was young. When I was playing this game, I can barely escape from the cops. When the player was caught up with by the cops, they would certainly hit the rear of the player's car and the car would get spins. To drive past a cop in NFS, players need to know why cars can move, how cars can move, and how to drive cars safely. Physical concepts and automobile engineering concepts are required to do this. It is a complicated process, and it is obviously out of the young’s capability, so AI enemies(cops) are removed from the game concept. The main challenges of this game come from different terrains and barriers.

Audience and competitive analysis.

This game is appropriate for audiences that aged over seven and up who enjoy playing casual sports games to relax themselves or children who are interested in cars or motorcycle. I believe seven is a good starting age because children may also have more patience than those who are younger than seven because they need to study at primary school, more patience means they will not give up easily when they fail. Above all, seven years old should be a good starting point. According to a research done by Concordia University in 2012, the majority of sports video game players are male (98.4 per cent). Nevertheless, according to Nintendo, sixty per cent of Mario Kart players are male (Ivan, 2021), so I think the target audience of this game are mainly male. But we also expect some females who are interested in sports games or motorcycles will become the audiences. Among children, boys are the main target audience. The first reason is cars and other vehicles are very sensorily engaging for children (GILLESPIE, 2020) “Kids can interact with toy cars, trucks, etc. through spinning their wheels, watching them move in a variety of directions, or hearing the sounds they make." (GILLESPIE, 2020) The second reason is this game is not a hard-core sports game, there is no high difficulty challenge task in this game, so they can get a lot of enjoyment and relax from finishing different levels of challenges from this game. Compare with other similar games, for example, there is one game called Moto X3M Pool Party. It performs very well as it is one of the most popular H5 games on html5games.com. Crazy Food Delivery has a similar game concept, similar operation but different difficulty levels. There are fewer challenge levels in Crazy Food Delivery compare with Moto X3M Pool Party. When I was playing Moto X3M, I failed about ten times at level three. Making a game with high difficulty may let the user feel anxious and give up playing this game, especially young players as they don't have enough capabilities. So, I think my game can do better than Moto X3M in the game difficulty aspect.

Game treatment and concept art.

Game world:

Backstory:

You are a retired professional motorcycle racer, but you haven’t ridden any motorcycle since you have retired, which is almost ten years! Your friend Ben has a part-time job in a food delivery company. However, he is ill recently and cannot go to work. More severely, he is short of money now! To help your friend, you dust off your motorcycle jacket and helmet, get back on the motorcycle and start food delivery! Even you are a professional racer before, food delivery is not an easy job in this area. You need to control the motorcycle very carefully to arrive safely. Good luck to you!

Player Objective:

You need to pick up food from the restaurant, get back to your motorbike, then try your best to overcome all difficulties and deliver food to your customers on time! No penalty will be applied if you go overtime, however, the earlier your customers get their food, the more tips you will get!

Character of this game:

Paul Jordan used to be a professional motorcycle racer. His special and exquisite driving skill helped him to become the winner of Isle of Man TT three times fifteen years ago. However, he was retired because of an accident during a race. His doctor suggested he should no longer resume motorcycle racing, but he can ride bikes in daily life.

Story Progression:

In this game, missions will process from easy to hard as the number of complete order increase. Initially, you will only deliver in cities, which only has flat roads. In later missions, you will deliver in the countryside, which has uneven road surface, mud road or even shallow rivers. The vehicle’s performance is different according to different road surfaces. So, remember to drive safely!

Key feature:

Many different environments at different levels. For the city scene,
Vehicle performance will be changed according to different road surfaces.
Cartoon concept art to attract more children players.
Various barriers simulate a real motorcycle trail.
Low game difficulty, friendly to different levels of players.
Low hardware requirements.
Third-person game, which allows players to observe surroundings easier than first-person game. So, players can make decisions better according to their surroundings.

Setting:

Crazy Food Delivery is a 2D game, so the player can only move forward and backward in the game. You can also rotate the motorcycle to avoid collision with to player itself or earn extra bonuses. The gravity system in this game is not 100% realistic. For example, the gravity acceleration is less than -9.8m/s^2 to let users rotate the motorcycle easier than in real life. More barriers will appear on the road surface in the countryside than in cities. Different road surface has different friction in this game. In other words, vehicle speed will decrease faster on unpaved roads or unpaved roads than on paved roads.

The player body, motorcycle, road surface and barriers have their own collider in this game. Once the player's body collides with walls or barriers, the player's health will decrease to zero and the game will fail immediately. If the body of the motorcycle (except two wheels) collide with walls or barriers, the motorcycle will also be destroyed immediately and the game fails.

Overview of mechanics:

In this game, you can control the player's motorcycle by pressing WASD. W/S are used to control motorcycle moves forward and backwards. A/D are used to rotate the motorcycle. If the player finishes some stunts on his way, he will get extra bonuses. For example, if the player rotates his bike 360 degrees, the timer will reduce by 0.5 seconds. Players can also pick up some special items to reduce the time on the timer.

Concept Art:

Player and motorbike

Game backgrounds:

Road Texture:

Mud road:

Concrete Road:

Grass surface:

River:

Wood pipe:

Stone:

Reference:

A. Stein, M. Consalvo, K. Mitgutsch. Who are sports gamers? A large scale study of sports video game players. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2012; DOI: 10.1177/1354856512459840

GILLESPIE, C., 2020. Why kids are obsessed with cars, trucks, and other vehicles. [online] Theweek.com. Available at:https://theweek.com/articles/931565/why-kids-are-obsessed-cars-trucks-other-vehi... <https: theweek.com="" articles="" 931565="" why-kids-are-obsessed-cars-trucks-other-vehicles=""> [Accessed 29 August 2021].</https:>

Ivan, T., 2021. Almost 40% of Mario Kart Tour players are female | VGC. [online] VGC. Available at: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/almost-40-of-mario-kart-tour-players-ar...<https: www.videogameschronicle.com="" news="" almost-40-of-mario-kart-tour-players-are-female=""> [Accessed 29 August 2021].</https:>