Draft Game Design Document: ”Space Pirate”
By Sebastien Marchadour
Id Number: B00148119
Introduction
“Space Pirate” puts the player in
the shoes of a swashbuckling pirate out in space looking for adventure
and profit, pitting you against a fleet of ships many times more
powerful than you. Will you survive to live the good life with your
mountain of money or crash and burn? You decide!
Abstract
In “Space Pirate” The player
controls his spacecraft simply using the arrow keys to move around and
dodge the many enemies’ laser fire. The Player uses the space key to
retaliate against the enemy ships and upon destroying them can loot the
ships (as he is a pirate) and create various improvements to his ship
(Power ups). The player will either have his weapons improved,
increasing his fire speed and therefore his stopping power, or his
shield recharge rate insuring his survivability.
Target Audience and Platform
The Genre of this game is a
scrolling space shooter (or scrolling Shoot ‘em up) and as such the
target audience will be people who enjoy these games. Also being a
simple there could be potential in the casual game market. Similar
games include Defender and Scramble, however these feature horizontal
scrolling “Space Pirate” will feature vertical scrolling. The platform
used will be Microsoft Windows and developed using Scratch.
This Game features very few key
selling points, but in this case it is a strength as this is a tried
and tested genre of game and previously games of this type have proven
to be popular.
Game Play
Controls
The Controls are as follows:
Space Bar: Fire Lasers
Up Arrow: Forward thrust
Down arrow: Backwards thrust
Left/Right Arrow: Left/Right thrust respectively
Scoring
Points will be awarded according to kills and power ups picked up
Point are as followed:
Regular Ship: 10 points
Power up: 50 points
Space Ninja (and bounty hunters): 75 points
Boss: 300 points
Win and Lose
To win the game the player must simply reach the end of the level and kill the boss.
To lose the player’s ship must be
badly damaged meaning that his shields have to be reduced to 0 at which
point he is vulnerable to a final kill shot during the 5 second
downtime before his shields start recharging again.
Level Design
There will be only one level
consisting of some minor skirmishes with some fighters followed by some
slightly tougher enemies and fast moving enemies that cloak randomly.
The climax of the level is a boss fight after which the player will
have completed the game. The game will feature vertical scrolling
however if this proves too hard to implement in Scratch then this will
likely be replaced with horizontal scrolling or alternatively a
flip-screen device.
Story
The premise of the game is that
the player is put in the shoes of Percival Plunderous the Third a space
pirate looking to for an adventure in which he can make enough money to
retire or maybe just live easy on earth of a couple of years.
The only named character in
“Space Pirate” is Percival Plunderous the Third. None know if this is
his real name, most other pirates’ say that it is a fake name but they
all agree that it’s a good one. He has been a space pirate for many
years and wants to do a big expedition to take a rest afterwards. This
led him to his current predicament about to fight the massive fleet.
Audio
Audio will use either recorded
human voice making sound effects (i.e. “Kablam” and “Pew-pew”) being used to
humorous effect or may feature layering of random sounds as more
enemies are killed to create music similar to PS2 game Rez made by
Sega’s United Game Artists. However the sound is not set in stone and
the game may not feature sound should implementation of these idea be
difficult or unfeasible.
