DIGD701 GAME DESIGN, GAME A WEEK: WK 3 Ritual

For this weeks game design theme, we were informed that it was "Ritual" which could take the form of many things. Initially the go to was the religious sort, sacrifice - filled with the likes of witches, magicians, cultists, worshipers etc. On the other hand rituals can also take form of habit which is what we chose to do. Our initial idea was to play around and explore the ritual of transport more so public transport. As students we are well seasoned with the art of catching trains, buses, ferries. We know the habits and hoodwinkery of these "conveniences" so this is how our game to be. "Retro Metro" - a game of buses (alternative name "Bus Dash") In our idea the player would have to navigate through a maze of buildings (much like how our cities are) to get their bus on time. But much like our habit, sometimes our stop requirements change so we would have the buses change their location. 

What we have in the end: 

- A maze of buildings that are solid objects (can not be passed through by the player)
- Buses that spawn but are a random color each round 

- Start menu 

- Game over screen triggered by the player making contact with any of the buses

- Sound of traffic

What fell through 

- A working timer that would trigger game over if the player did not reach their bus on time (could not work out how to do this)

- Buses to spawn in random places (instead they currently stay where they are in the beginning)
- A scoring system for each time the player gets their bus on time

Process of making:

The overall backgrounds of the pieces were "photo bashes" a mix of imagery done by Timothy Noakes

The buses and the player character were developed by Timothy too ->



As our game was 2D and a maze view, I needed to make a bunch of buildings in pixel art form while capturing a top down view. Below is the image I ended up using to take individual buildings from to model off and transform into pixel art format. It was interesting attempting to translate so much detail into 8bit format in such a small scale.

Author's note: The amount of time it took just to get a decent picture of a city from the true top view -.-'' too long...