here

Pitch Doc
for the game:
“Illegal Alien”
(name yet to be finalized)
By Matthew Fairchild, Daniel Fedh, Stefan Laimer, Florian Weinberger
The following Paper will give a description of the game Idea by the group of Matthew Fairchild,
Stefan Laimer, Daniel Fedh and Florian Weinberger.
1. Theme
The theme for this year’s practical course is “alien”. Alien can mean basically 2 very different things
(according to merian webster online English dictionary)
-
Adjective: Strange, foreign, differing in nature or character
Noun: A person who was born in a different country than where he/she lives, a creature that
comes from somewhere other than the planet earth
As can be seen, the theme “alien” allows for a very broad spectrum of possible ideas and
implementations, and can be interpreted in many different ways. Our Game will thus build upon
these definitions and incorporate the ideas associated with it.
2. Game
2.1.
Story
“Illegal Alien” takes place in a world far in the future. Humans need to find a way of interstellar travel
to colonize other planets and survive on large space stations we have already prepared, but have yet
to operate. We have always prevailed, and we shall prosper still! It took mankind a decades, but we
have managed to bring our space station into space and interstellar travel has been mastered. What
we were only now able to figure it, we are only a very small and relatively undeveloped species in our
galaxy, and there is a large bureaucratic machine managing interstellar and intergalactic coexistence.
As a kind who has now seemingly conquered space we are invited to join, and we quickly learn we
are not too welcome.
Turns out, our planet is surrounded by the territory of some alien species that are not too keen with
us leaving our planet, our territory, and now bringing our people into their regions. What if we give
birth in their territories? Does the child have the right to 2 glorbs of inquats, like their newborn do?
Surely we will now also take away their jobs, from their people. And if we sneak our friends and
family from our planet into these regions, how will they make sure we are not just moochers,
benefitting from their equal particle distribution? Those were the fears that our “space neighbours”
had, and the measures they took were drastic. They built a gigantic sphere around our planet to
fence us off of their territories, guarding the border from our planet to theirs. We were illegally here,
they said. “Ridiculous, no one is illegal” we argued. But they thought otherwise. We were deemed as
aliens in their sector, and they wanted us out.
But we are human beings. We will not go without a fight! That’s the human way to deal with such a
situation. If they want our space station back on earth, the one we fought so hard for to bring into
outer space in the first place, then only over my dead body!...And yours too… and basically
everybody’s because every human left is in that space station they are attacking …
Say, would you mind climbing into one our space jets and try stopping them from killing the rest of
human kind? Okay cool thanks.
2.2.
“Elevator Pitch”
The Game is a top-down arcade shooter set in space in which the player uses the gravity of
surrounding planets to maximize his effectiveness in defending a human space station from incoming
aggressors.
2.3.
Gameplay Description
The Player takes control of a small spaceship that is capable of two things:
1. Engaging in combat directly with its onboard laser gun. This gun fires similarly to an assault
rifle but does relatively low damage to targets.
2. Build defensive structures. These structures can only be built after collecting a minimum
number of resources required. The more resources you have before placing a structure, the
better that structure will be. Unlike ships though, these structures have no stearing
capabilities of their own and are therefore susceptible to the gravitation of the surrounding
planets. Placement is thus vitally important to maximize their effectiveness.
At the center of the screen is the space station which you as the player need to defend, and
randomly distributed around the rest of the screen are a number of planets (which will have a
gravitational pull on the player’s structures).
The challenge now lies in defending aforementioned space station from the enemies which will
attack. See section 1.3 for the two distinct enemy types.
At the beginning of the game the rate at which enemies will appear will be low, but over time will
constantly increase.
For the player, moment to moment gameplay will look as follows:
His goal is to build defensive turrets that will aid him in his objective. To build these turrets, he will
have to gather resources. To obtain these resources he will need to destroy enemy ships. After doing
so they will explode and leave behind pieces of material which the player can collect. After collecting
a minimum amount of resources the player can then spawn a turret behind him. These turrets will be
completely exposed to the gravitational pulls of all the surrounding planets. The positioning of the
turrets is therefore of utmost importance for the players success. This is elaborated upon with the
following two examples:
Example 1: Suppose a player has enough resources to place a turret. He flies over to a large planet
and places the turret perfectly into the orbit. This results in the turret circling the planet indefinitely
and thus providing the player with additional firepower (assuming enemies fly into its range) until
the end of the game.
Example 2: A Player has gathered the minimum amount of necessary resources and places the turret
as soon as possible without considering the location. Through the interaction of the different
gravitations the turret flies around in ever greater circles until it is slung out of the players view never
to return, thus rendering it useless to the player.
As mentioned before a minimum amount of resources need to be collected before being able to
spawn a turret. Spawning a turret with the minimum amount will yield the basic turret. It is possible
however to spawn stronger and more sophisticated turrets. To do so, one simply has to collect more
resources before suing them to spawn a turret. Between the minimum amount of resources, which
will yield the weakest turret and the maximum amount of resources which will yield the most
powerful turret, there are several discrete intermediary goals that can be passed which will (after
passing them) result in a turret of appropriate strength.
The player will be able to track his/her progress in collecting material through the resource bar,
which will be located in the bottom left of the screen.
2.4.
Relation to the theme “Alien”
Our game takes into account both the noun as well as the adjective meaning of the word “alien”. The
gameplay has the player fight beings from outer space, interpreting the word “alien” in the sense
arguably most people would. The background story and the idea behind the players motivation on
the other hand has the payer himself be the “alien” in a foreign place.
So to conclude, we have incorporated “alien” in more than one way into our game, both in story and
gameplay.
2.5.
Game Distinction and technical challenge
The question of what makes our game distinct from others is twofold. First, we believe that the
combination of different, traditional game genres (real time action shooter and tower defense) is an
unusual yet interesting and fun combination. On the other hand, the backbone of our gameplay is
the gravity mechanic which the player will use to his advantage. Thus the gravity mechanic is another
way our game will stand out against others.
Though those are the two distinctive properties of our game, neither one will be the technical
challenge we will need to refine.
The technical challenge we will face is the artificial intelligence of the enemy entities. Since the game
field will be very dynamic it is of even higher importance for the enemies to act in a comprehensible
way. Implementing the algorithms and tuning them to react appropriate to their ever changing
environment and coordinating among each other to optimize their own strategies will be the
greatest challenge from a technical standpoint.
3. Art & Visuals
This section will document the different stages of the art pipeline. Note that not all designs may be
adopted in the final game, since all potential art will be listed, even if not chosen to be implemented.
3.1.
Concept Art
This section will collect all the pre-implementation concept art of the different aspects of the game.
Each element has it’s own subsection with the corresponding images.
3.1.1. Turrets
3.1.2. Player Ship
3.1.3. Enemy Ships
3.1.4. Space Station