An amazing adventure filled with love, common passion and fun
Currently my daughter is 7yo, but she plays games since a few years now: it can’t be helped, I am a gamedesigner and often play games to analyze competitors… And maybe because I like it too yup.
So games are a bit present in our daily life. Don’t worry I (my wife) restrict her a lot, but she can still play sometimes. She also often see me design, code and draw during week-end on my personal projects.
So what was bound to happen did happen: one day she said “could you create a game for me dad, please?”
I think that was the second sentence I wanted to hear in my life just after her first “daddy” 😍
At that moment I said:
I will not create a game for you, I will create a game with you.
And from here starts our great collaboration!
Step #1: Understanding What She Wants
Because what she wants is what she likes. Even if I know what she likes roughly, we were able to talk deeper about what she really wanted.
Her favorites game is without a doubt Pokemon! She talked about it almost everyday so I wasn’t surprised when I heard her saying she wanted to create a pokemon game.
First of all, I can’t create exactly a pokemon-like game for different reasons I explainder to her:
- Pokemon is a trademark used by another company and we don’t own any right on it
- We are a team of two whereas they where a team of probably more than 100 (especially for the last ones)
- We are doing it during our free time
- We aren’t as skilled as a real team
So we have to do what we can within our range of possibilites without seeing it too big. She understood it, especially when I talked about the complexity between 2D and 3D.
Me explaining the difference between 2D and 3D to my 7yo daughter (I am sooo an artist)
We agreed then on creating a game with some pokemon mechanisms (fighting and catching other animals to create a huge collection) but we should simplify it, and we were going to make it 2D.
Then I asked her to think and describe a typical level: what is the player’s objective, what will he encounter, perform and be rewarded with.
After a while she cames up with this:
She explained me some key elements she wanted:
- We start with a cat (she named it Michat)
- We have grass on the floor where we can encounter and fight animals
- Different type of animals can be found
- We have some fence where we need to jump over and some gates we needs to open
- We have a special power we can use once
- We have normal powers we can use more than once
- We can buy items when we reach the shop
- At the end of the level we reach our home where our mother (who also got a Michat) says something
- Our home is designed on a straight line: we have to pass through the bedroom to reach the kitchen (why not?!)
That was a great start! We have the basic controls (left, right, jump, action/activate), leveldesign elements (grass, fence, gate), the challenge (fight monsters), the reward (capture monsters, win money to buy stuff) and the objective (reaching the house).
We will need to adjust some elements and design some others (while I have a rough idea, we still don’t know how we really fight against monsters) but at least we have something to start with.
The other thing I asked her was to think about the animals she wanted to have in the game:
Nice start! With all these elements we are now ready to start our research about the art style and the gameplay feeling: for me they are the most important pillars of a game.
Step #2: Transforming what she wants into something feasible and enjoyable
I am not a graphist. Sometimes I enjoy creating some pixel art stuff but it’s quite simplistic and I can’t add a lof of details… And to add some spice to it I am colorblind!
So what should I do to create something feasible within my skills, cute (she wants something cute, me too) and which drives the gameplay (if possible)?
It’s when I looked at Michat & POCE she drew earlier that an idea came into my mind: why not creating ball-head-animals with simplistic animations?
So I opened my favorite pixelart tool: Aseprite! And I came up with our first design for the Bullesine creatures (that’s the name she cames up with):
After her validation I went to animate them (her favorite: the rabbit!)
That was a great moment because she never learned how animation worked. So I showed her the different pictures I drawed to create the illusion of movement, and by clicking on “play” the Bullesine came to life. I saw sparkles in her eyes when she just understood the principle (just after that she called her little brother to show him how it worked, she was really excited)!
Now we have, I think, a good design to start with. But I always have in mind the main question: how do we fight? Because it will be the heart of the game, the main element in the gameplay loop which will drives the player further in the game.
With this type of design, two games came into my mind:
- Angry Birds
- Merge Magic
Their gameplay are interesting and can be adapted to our game. We could:
- Like Angry Birds, throw our Bullesine against others: but we have to keep it simpler. I don’t want to add too much precision requirement in this game
- Like Merge Dragon, two or more elements of the same type can be merged to a bigger and stronger one. But I don’t want to add the same diversity of merging elements (it will be too much for our kind of game)
So I came up with a first way to fight against an enemy and improve our Bullesine: we have all of our creatures following us (we will need to design a main character) and when we encounter an enemy we can throw our cute creatures against it. The resulting effects could be damage, special effect and why not merging if the Bullezine are of the same type and same level!
That’s where we are at the moment. The next step will be to start coding and test the gameplay feeling of throwing a Bullesine against an enemy and having some logical reactions.
Thank you for reading and stay tuned for the next part!