Game Concept Devlog

Working title: Training for my first badminton tournament

Concept:

You are an aspiring badminton player who needs to train for his first badminton tournament. Badminton is no joke so you will have to train hard. To do this, the player will have to run for as long as possible, whilst avoiding many dangerous and deadly obstacles, because obviously badminton is an incredibly dangerous sport. The gameplay will be inspired by games such as jetpack joyride and monster dash, with the concept inspired by the series of shorts by ‘mikeymaybeme’ on TikTok

Category: Endless runner, shooter, some platforming elements.

Concept creation process:

To come up with the concept of this game, I looked at games such as jetpack joyride, and decided that I wanted to create a game of a similar style, i.e. I wanted to make an endless runner game where the player needs to avoid many different types of obstacles coming their way. I also think that an endless runner game may be easier to create, as instead of having to design multiple levels, I just need to design different types of obstacles that the player needs to face (for example, lasers the player needs to avoid or something that will target the player).

(Jetpack Joyride, Halfbrick Studios 2011)

Also, being someone that very much loves badminton, I wanted to bring the badminton theme into the game somehow. I thought back to the series of TikToks made by mikeymaybeme, that have the caption “Day x of training for my first badminton tournament” while he performs and outlandish and ridiculous feat of strength, such as performing a heavy deadlift on a skateboard with another skateboard in his mouth. This gave me the rather humorous idea (at least to me) that the player will be training for a badminton tournament by endlessly running whilst having to avoid death traps

(mikeymaybeme, TikTok)

Audience and Competitive analysis:

I intend for this game to be more of a casual game, where the player is mostly competing against themselves to try and set a high score. There won’t really be any way to win the game since it will be an endless runner game. Other games in this genre, such as jetpack joyride, performed extremely well.

Game treatment:

The player will constantly be moving forward with no way to stop, they will be able to move slightly faster or slow down a little bit with the ‘D’ and ‘A’ keys respectively. The player will be able to jump with varying height depending on how long they hold down the space bar, so if they hold the button down, they will jump high, and if they just tap it, they will just hop. I intend for there to be multiple types of obstacles for the player to overcome. These will be static lasers, moving lasers, ground spikes and rockets.  

The static lasers will be static with respect to the background and will kill the player on impact. The moving lasers will work in a similar fashion, but they will be moving by either transforming their position or rotating. I intend for the rockets to work similarly to jetpack joyrides rockets, where the rocket is announced to be coming from the right side of the screen with an exclamation mark, tracking the player’s vertical position, until it appears on screen, allowing the player to jump over when it arrives. The ground spikes will be spikes that the player will have to jump over or else they will be killed.

If possible, I intend for the player to be able to collect upgrades that will last for a set amount of time (say 8 seconds), such as invincibility.

The player will not need a health bar or anything like that as they will be killed on impact by any obstacle.

 (concept art made by me in GIMP)