Bumper Bash: Game Play Thoughts

Ok, my game plan is set, now down to deciding what if any logic bricks will be used to make it work. I think I will separate out each element and then decide what needs to be done for each one. Once I have outlined what each element needs, I will be able to see what logic brick set ups will be required to create my game.

Let’s start with the players, some things they will share in common and some will be different depending on if the bumper car is the main player or controlled by the computer.

1- Main Player:

• movement
• collect points from fruit
• register “damage” from traps
  • skull pads (-5 pts.)
  • slide into black tunnel (loss of life)

2- Computer controlled players:

• movement: appearance of intelligent movements
  • move forward
  • if near another player move towards player
  • if near fruit move towards fruit.
• try to hit other players into traps
• try to collect fruit points

Next up are game elements that the players interact with. Fruit for collecting of points, arena traps and chute operation.

3- Fruit:

• collection of fruit for points
  • for high score
  • to gain more lives
• randomly appearing, only visible for set time.
• fruit moves around arena.
  • random movement for fruit:
    • enable physics
    • slow forward motion
    • set up a grid of poles at fruit height and have them bounce off and self correct using physics.

4- Skull pads:

• slam out of wall when any player gets near
• deducts 5 points from player score.

5- Black tunnel:

• when player gets too close, player loses a life and player disappears causing player to re-enter arena through his chute.

6- Player Chutes:

• players enter arena through chute
  • main player manually triggers re-entry
  • Other players-auto re-entry
• plunger launch of player (like pinball)
  • triggers gate to lower if player in chute

There will be six scenes to this game that need to be set up. The start up scene where you get to choose your player. Four scenes, one for each player as the main player, as the main game. And an overlay scene to display points and lives available for each player.

1- Start up scene:

• game instructions and choice of player to use as main player
• choice of player then launches correct scene for game play

2- Main game scene:

• one game scene for each available player as main player
• other three players then controlled by computer

3- Overlay scene:

• used to display score for each player and number of available lives left to play.

4- Misc scenes:

• to display messages to the players
  • loss of life, due to tunnel trap
  • relaunch your player message
• game over
  • you lose
  • you won

Well I think that should about cover needed elements of game play. Most of this I remember how to do from the last game I made. But I’m sure I will need to do some research and experimenting on how to accomplish the rest. One of the biggest challenges for me will be setting up the appearance of randomness as well as giving my computer controlled players the ability to actually try to win. Especially as I will only be using logic bricks to accomplish it. I know it can be done, it just might take a lot of testing and tweaking.

Stay tuned, hopefully a beta version will soon appear.