Balloon Cargo Game Presentation

09/08/2011

Today in class was pitch day for each team. Each team got up and presented their ideas they came up with for their game topic. We presented our one page pitch for our Balloon Cargo game.

After getting feedback from classmates and the professor we met in our groups and got to work on a new idea for a game. We had to pick a different genre than our previous game. After everyone threw out some game and genre ideas, we settled on the idea of an action / shooter game.

The game would have similar mechanics as Paper Toss on iOS and Android, where you would swipe / fling water balloons. We decided you would be playing as a kid with a backpack full of water balloons hiding behind a fence.

You would be throwing the water balloons at people, cars, trying to cause as much havok as possible in about a minute. We figured from past experience as kids throwing water balloon, that any time you started hitting people or cars, it wouldn’t be long until the cops showed up. We wanted the game to incorporate skill, so you would have to vary your throwing of the water balloons with how you swiped your finger up on the screen. So there would be some variance in the distance you could throw the balloons. We also wanted to add some difficulty in hitting moving targets, so In order to hit the moving targets you would also have to time your throws just right. But at the same time we wanted the game to be fun, so there would be unlimited balloons and you could just start throwing like a mad man if you wanted to.

You would have different shaped balloons to pick between, depending on what kind of mayhem you wanted to create. After you hit objects, we talked about people dropping something (cargo), that the user could either touch the screen to go pick up, or the end of each level would turn into a top down view of the street, and you would have to navigate like frogger through the street to pick up the cargo and then get back to the fence to leave the scene.

To add to replay value and to keep the accuracy important, we would have a scoring system similar to angry birds. Where you would have 3 stars, or maybe golden balloons possible per board. That in order to get these stars you would have to be accurate in throwing as well as pick up enough cargo to get a high enough score. The scoring screen would list the different types of balloons you used, how many were thrown, how many hit targets and an accuracy percentage. Also listing how many people were hit, cars, houses, pets, babies, etc...

Level difficulty we talked about being able to unlock new types of balloons. Every boy growing up always loved the water balloons that looked like grenades. We also talked about not always being behind a fence looking at a street. We talked about having playgrounds, school yards. We even talked about having a winter board where instead of water balloons he would be throwing snowballs. Don’t kid yourself in thinking we didn’t talk about having an unlockable yellow snowball.