HW9 Balancing

Escape from Hashima is a single-player game based on the story line of a man trying to retrieve his father who was accidentally left behind after the island was evacuated.  Since the island is small, the game is designed to take place over the course of an evening, night, and morning in game-time, or not more than a few hours total in real-time.  The player competes against the computer to find the father and leave the island, with limited resources and limited, but replenishable, health.  While there might be a scoring system to allow the player to compete against himself or other players to maximize his or her final score, this has only been loosely discussed by my team.

Fairness comes into play through the difficulty faced opposing the computer controlled opponents.  Stray dogs may attack, and a released pet raccoon may steal supplies.  Although the mechanisms for how this will occur have not been finalized, we plan to make the outcome dependent on a combination of collecting appropriate defense items, awareness of what is going on in the game, and fighting ability.  No one item or skill will be required in order to achieve the desired outcome in a fight.

Adjusting difficulty level would be the easiest way for our game to balance challenge vs success.  The first level, driving a boat, is short and requires a completely different skill set from the main focus of the game.  We also want to make the most difficult level be the act of finding the missing father, with the final level of returning to the boat to be fast and easy.  This means that difficulty will not increase with each level.  However, it would be simple to reduce or increase the number of animal attacks, length of night vs day, or add storms or additional opponents.  A haunted version of the game would be an interesting heightened difficulty level.  For the purposes of this course, we will most likely only create the one basic difficulty level.

Our game’s most meaningful choices will be the path taken around the island, which items to collect, and whether to fight off or befriend a stray dog.  If the player chooses to explore an area of the island that the missing father is not located on, the game will take longer to complete, which will introduce more opportunities to face opponents.  The number of items that may be carried will likely be limited, so the player will need to balance a need for food, defense, and shelter.  The decision to fight off or befriend a stray dog will change the game experience.  Not all dogs can be befriended, so it is a health and life risk to attempt to befriend.  However, dogs can be used as defense, for finding objects, and for finding the missing person, especially when combined with other found objects such as the father’s found jacket.  The game can still be won, regardless of which choice is made, but the easiness of completion, the time balance, and the general experience of gameplay can be made radically different.  However, we will attempt to prevent any choice from becoming a dominant strategy by not giving any one choice too much power over the game’s outcome.

Our game uses both head and hands, but is more focused on the head.  The first part of the game, driving the boat to the dock is mostly based on a physical challenge.  Also, the opponents faced while on the island will be fought with fighting skills, in addition to the foresight used in collecting defense items.  However, most of the game will be based on making decisions about what items to collect, learning one’s way around the island for the search, and anticipating danger.  For this reason, it is designed to be more appealing to those who enjoy a mental challenge more than perfecting the muscle memory involved in steering and fighting.

There are multiple forms of punishment in this game.  The health meter will prevent the player from doing whatever it is that he or she wants to do without consideration of the character’s needs, and will terminate play if the character’s needs are not met.  Failing to collect items will work in a similar manner, by not allowing players who fail to collect any defense, food, or shelter items to survive.  The player might also find that certain obstacles will require collecting enough of certain types of items before being allowed to pass, although what these obstacles and items will be haven’t been finalized.  Items will also deplete, meaning that each item will be given a set number of uses, ranging from once to unlimited, depending on item type.

Players will be given a sense of freedom by the fact that they can wander around any non-obstructed parts of the island, but will still have a controlled experience.  The father that the player is trying to find and the opponents faced will not simply be sitting and waiting in one spot.  Actions that the player makes will act as unseen triggers to the placement of the father and opponents.  There may also be additional restrictions placed on movement across the island for the last part of the game, basically adding obstructions to the landscape in order to lead the player back to the boat docks without wandering around lost for a large amount of time.

We expect that a big part of the appeal of our game will be its setting on Hashima Island.  Since this is a real place, and is of popular interest as an abandoned city, we want to make the layout of the game island match the layout of the real island.  Simply having the same types of buildings on the same spot as they are on the real island should give players the feeling of exploring the real place, even without fancy meshes that mimic the true-life look of each street and building.  This will be heightened by offering the chance to read information about the real island and its history in the menus.