Prototype1/Sprint 1 Ants texted based game ideaisation process. (2nd Oct)

We set up a Mural room to plan a and discuss the range of ideas we had for our game. We eventually decided that the Ant Colony game would be the most interesting to explore as the range of content and decisions and ant has to make is quite vast e.g. protecting queen, finding food, defending against other ants and creatures.

We have also decided to use Twine [1] instead of Roll20[2] as it is more user friendly and because we would have to do a lot of scripting for Roll20 for decision making and AI controls which would taken a lot of extra time and would inevitably lead to us spending less time on the story detracting from the narrative of the game. Also with twine we found ways of adding in images, so it would still be possible to tell a visual story.

Looking into the idea of Ants, we’re looking to make a resource type game were the player will have a finite number of ants and food to keep its colony stable and increasing. You can send ants to get food, but each decision will have consequences. e.g. You send ants to steal food from a family picnic, which results in you getting more food, but that family then come and pour water on your ant hill killing 200 of your ants.

We have come up with a good end game as well, with the goal of getting your colony to a set number of ants e.g. 10,000 ants in your colony.

Overall I think we have a solid concept of what our story will be about and how we’re going to structure our game. Feel like this is really good take on the resource manager type games and just from the concepts we’ve discussed I think it will work really well with our Ant colony idea.

A further feature which would sit nicely with the game would be to add in different types of ants e.g. you have 100 ants in your colony so you turn 25 into worker ants 25 into scavenger ants and 50 into army ants. This is a neat idea though we’ve agreed that a lot of our ideas may have to be altered when it comes to development.

[1] Chris Klimas, 2009, Twine [Software], Available at: https://twinery.org/

[2] Riley Dutton, 2012, Roll20, Available at: https://roll20.net/

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