The Shaman Design Document

Mar 11

Slack would be the preferred way to communicate regarding this game

Overall premise: You play as an Inuit-Japanese priest in Alaska who communes with the spirits in order to help their village. Gameplay consists of managing your time between praying to the spirits, performing ceremonies, telling stories, and befriending fellow villagers. Players goal at the beginning is to build a salmon ladder, and this is the player’s motivation for the start of the game.

Character’s backstory: You were a salmon who prayed to the gods to become human and help her fellow salmon kind. Because of this, you can commune with nature easily. This also means you are an outsider in the village, meaning the player is able to develop relationships with villagers.

Audience

Harvest Moon audience. Simple gameplay to relax, with a new twist.

Art

Will be hand-drawn, with a style which can be easily made by not-too-experienced-artists (Lucas).

Perspective

The visual perspective will be similar to Don’t Starve in town areas:

The perspective will change to side scrolling when going into forest/other areas:

Platforming sections will not have platformer type gameplay

Gameplay:

In town: Talking to NPCs

Investigating stuff to do quests

Buying and collecting wood and crafting it inside

Core Game Pillars:

Mini games
1. Rhythm game for dancing
  1. With some grinding to level up dance
2. Reading books for history
  1. Telling the tales to kids
    1. Using emotions stuff.
      1. Rock paper scissors emotion reading
3. Working on the cemetery stuff
  1. Supplemental mechanic, not primary one
Crafting w/out emphasis on resource gathering (no mining or the like)
1. Medicine to sell for money
2. Materials for ceremonies
3. Charms for buffs
4. Upgrading equipment
NPC Interaction (Talking, story bits)
Dating
1. Gifts
2. Little events to increase social standing
3. Increasing relationships gives discounts on stores, etc.
Ceremonies
1. Setting up materials
2. Dancing
3. Telling stories

Dialogue

Choices will change the response, but likely not much more.

Pre-Mortem

What could go horribly wrong?

Overscoping.
Style isn’t sustainable; we don’t have enough people for all the art.
Classes are too time consuming to work on game.
Lack motivation to work on game.
Don’t know what to do next.
Don’t know how to implement specific game features.
No way to share game between team members.
Minigame difficulty doesn’t cater to audience.
We offend the cultures we are trying to represent.
We aren’t comfortable with asking other people to help with artistic vision and art.
Lucas is too busy working on his own projects to work on this one.
Game doesn’t have a unique spin on the formula, so that it becomes redundant in the video game world.
Both people aren’t putting in roughly equivalent amounts of work.

How will we make sure these things don’t go wrong?

Have regular check-ins to make sure things are going smoothly. Set deadlines, and if we don’t meet it rethink game’s scale. Meet with Prof. Prate regularly to have his guidance.
Figure out an art style which all team members art at least somewhat competent in. If there is too much art we will bring in more people to help with the game.
Give ourselves time to work on the game, less time socializing (:P). Classes come first though.
Have set times during the week to work together on the project.
Make Trello board so we know what to do, list Trello board by priority so we know what to work on next when we finish with one thing and move on.
Consult Prof Prate for resources, ask fellow students for help.
Establish GitHub early on so we know it works. Unity seems to work with GitHub well.
Have new people test out the minigames to make sure difficulty is tuned correctly. Have difficulty start low and increase gradually.
Make culture which is a hybrid between Inuit and Japanese cultures, so that it doesn’t have to be 100% authentic. Borrows from cultures but is still its own thing.
Find people we can trust to work on it. Chris could help with programming. Ask people in Panther games to work on art potentially. Ask Prof. Prate for where to find more people to work on art side of project.
Lucas is going to put other projects on hold to work on this one.
Art style is different, different culture, lean more into spirit side of game. More in-depth character interaction. Fall in love with the world you are in, how it works. Game expands as you play it. New characters come as you progress in the game.
Make sure everyone knows how to do both some artistic and some technical aspects of the game. Make sure we work together at least twice a week.

Gaining special items to do stuff
Going all the way up to the game demo- aka after the salmon ladder gets built perhaps.
Need for demo: minigames, dialogue, NPCs, crafting.
https://www.gameart2d.com/freebies.html

Gameplay Mechanic Ideas

Dancing is a rhythm, somewhat similar to Guitar Hero but with a different, 2D perspective. Dances could potentially serve as a buff to the player. After completing a dance, in addition to the exp / skill gained, the player receives a temporary increase to one some aspect. Could make it so that only one dance can be performed each day so that the player doesn’t just keep doing dances all the time. Buffs could last for more than a single day, so the player is encouraged to try out different dances to find one they would like. As dancing skill levels up, the effects could become more powerful.

Dance Buff Brainstorm: