Balloon Blast Game Presentation

09/13/2011

Today was another pitch day in class. Here is our one page pitch for Balloon Blast:

After the game pitches, our team met again to come up with another game design. I talked to Mary about how I had taken her game idea and morphed it to work with balloons and cargo. I pitched the idea to the team, but didn’t do that great of job explaining it, since most people still seemed confused. Mary got up and helped explain it with some better drawings. The team seemed to like the idea, but wanted to put out some other ideas.

After coming up with some different ones we decided to take one of Shandice’s original game ideas and change it a little bit. Her game idea was to have balloons caring cargo across the screen and you would have to pop the balloons to have the cargo fall into matching colored bins at the bottom of the screen. Instead we would be having balloons traveling upward, and we could grab them and move them from side to side, to make sure they went into the correct bins. This reminded me of a sorting mini game I liked that can be found on the Nintendo DS New Super Mario game (video of the mini game) where you have to sort red and black bombs into the correct sorting bins. If you don’t do it fast enough a bomb goes off and the game is over. If you put a red bomb in the black bin, or vise versa, the bomb blows up the bombs in that bin and you lose them. After looking up the video and showing it to the team we incorporated some of those ideas into this game.

Game play would have you sorting the balloons from side to side, similar to a game like tetris, so we also wanted to have a way for the player to move the balloon up to the top faster once it was in the right place. We decided to have the user tap on the balloon to inflate it a little to increase it’s speed. But if you inflate too much it will pop the balloon.

We came up with a background story of the player being an employee in a balloon factory and you have to sort the balloons into the correctly colored bins. To add to the story we would have the boss’s son that constantly is wreaking havoc, putting out obstacles, bomb balloons, etc. The bomb balloons are bad in that if they get into the collection bins, the bomb will explode and destroy balloons you have already sorted. You are able to pop them by over inflating them, and will get bonus points for doing so.

We talked about having level progression by increasing the number of bins and colors of balloons. That harder levels would have bomb balloons that would look like normal balloons but were unstable, they would shake a little. Levels would end after the day and your shift was over. It was decided that we would have a window in the background and you would see the sun / darkness change as the board progressed.