Project Description

• What kind of game are you planning to build?
  • We’re planning to build a maze-solving game with a twist. The players will play different roles: Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave. The goal of the game is to help Alice reach her destination within a time limit. While Bob, Carol, and Dave can move around easily in the maze, Alice is visually impaired severely so that she has a very limited range of view in the maze, and her “level of insecurity” increases when she hits obstacles or when she is far away from the other players. Once the “level of insecurity” reaches a limit, everyone loses immediately. In addition, Alice is invisible to other players unless the others have reached a certain “level of awareness” by clearing obstacles in the maze. Alice will use her skill to detect and avoid obstacles, while others need to clear these obstacles and create a safe path for Alice to reach her goal.

• What are the goals of the game, how do players win, how do they lose?
  • Goal: Alice needs to reach the destination while staying close to the other players and away from obstacles. Other players need to clear obstacles and help Alice reach her destination.
  • Win if Alice reach the destination within the time limit.
  • Lose if either of these is true
    • Destination not reached within the time limit.
    • Alice’s level of insecurity reaches a limit and Alice falls into despair.
      • Level of insecurity increases if
        • Alice hits obstacles or is too far away from other players.

• What are the interesting or unique aspects to your game?
  • The concept of the game is unique. The game illustrates a world from a marginalized group’s point of view, represented by Alice: While the world is invisible to Alice, Alice herself is invisible to others as well because people are not aware of the visually impaired - when people leave shopping carts on sidewalk (example of an obstacle in the game) instead of returning them, they often don’t realize how much trouble they may have caused. As the other players help clear obstacles, they develop awareness for the marginalized group and make the game world more accessible.
  • Although there are two kinds of roles in this game, the players are not competing against each other. Instead, they work together towards one ultimate goal.

• What are the list of features of your game?
  • Must-Have features:
    • Game landing/loading/ending pages
    • Top-down third-person perspective
    • Maze map with obstacles at specific locations
    • Alice with her special skill & special sound effects
    • All other characters with normal attack & awareness level
    • Lose Condition: Timer for the game; Insecurity level
    • Collision detection and response
    • Randomly assigned roles
  • Would Be Really Nice features:
    • The user chooses the role
    • Other sound effects and theme music
    • Special skills for Bob, Carol, and Dave
    • Story-telling at the start of the game
    • Randomized spawn locations
    • Randomized obstacle locations
    • Special perspective/camera for Alice: 1st person
  • Cool But Only If Ahead Of Schedule:
    • Special walls which could be destroyed
    • Multiple maps
    • Polished UI

Group Management

• What are the major roles in your group's management?
  • Our team has 8 people in total. Jack will lead overall logistics, and we will form several subgroups based on the area we will work on. Since each subgroup is relatively small, we do not have major roles within the subgroup.

• How will decisions be made? By leader, consensus?
  • The decisions will be made mostly based on consensus. Jack would make the final decision if we encountered a harsh decision-making situation.

• How will you communicate and collaborate online?
  • We will communicate on discord and collaborate using github, notion, and google drive.

• How will you know when you're off schedule, and how will you deal with schedule slips?
  • In the following week, we will schedule more time to finish what we left off. We will also prioritize “Must Have” features and if we don’t have enough time, we will let some specific features slip.

• Who will produce the weekly group status reports?
  • Week 2: Jack
  • Week 3: Ashley
  • Week 4: Xiaoxiao
  • Week 5: Manshi
  • Week 6: Yucheng
  • Week 7: Jiahui
  • Week 8: Yingkai
  • Week 9: Zhiying
  • Week 10: Jack

• When will you have your group meetings (separate from the meeting with instructors)?
  • In-person meeting in B220 at 3-4 pm on Fridays.
  • Subgroup and intergroup meetings will be scheduled as needed.
  • Standup meeting (on Discord) every two days.

Project Development

• What are the development roles and who will handle them?

• What tools will you use?
  • OpenGL
  • C++
  • Designer Tools: Photoshop, Indesign, Blender, Cinema 4D

• How will you do testing?
  • Unit test
  • Integration test
  • Beta test with users

• How will you do documentation (both internal group documentation as well as external player documentation)?
  • Commented code
  • Notion

Project Schedule

• Define a set of milestones with a specific definition of what each milestone is, what it means to complete each milestone, and when you expect to complete them. Define the milestones at two scales, a high level set of key milestones like integration and design freeze, and a low level set of weekly milestones.

[Game Logic] Staged Game Play

[Art] Tasks & Schedule