Midterm Idea – One Piece Map

Concept:

My midterm is a game called Uncharted. It grew out of my Assignment 3 piece, a generative sea chart where a ship sails from island to island and draws the route behind itself as it goes. Every run gives you a completely different sea, and once I had that working I kept thinking it was already most of a game that nobody was playing.

I am a big One Piece fan and that is where the idea came from, a sea nobody has mapped and a crew crossing it island by island. You set sail, the ship charts a sea that has never existed before, and something is guarding every island. Beat what is guarding it and the way to the next island opens.

Design:

The whole thing is drawn to look like an old nautical chart. Parchment colour, faded stains on the paper, tiny dashes for open water, a compass rose in the corner and a double line border. Each island is about twelve elipses going over eachother instead of just one shape, cause I figured out from Assignment 3 that if you overlap enough circles the outline will stop looking like circles and start reading like a coastline, then deeper into the island, etc.

For this draft I mostly built the main menu, since the brief says the experience has to start with a screen that gives instructions and waits. Three screens work so far: the menu, a how to play page, and the map.

What I am happiest with is that menu is there and the ship is sailing in the background kind of like a loading screen or something you’d see in an actual game. The title uses a real One Piece display font and everything else uses Metamorphous. I tried the menu in a few fonts first, but they didn’t work out so I just stuck with these two.

Assignment 5 - One Piece Map - How to Play Screen — Assignment 5 – One Piece Map – How to Play Screen

This is a basic how to play screen, but what I plan to actually have it as is like an intro and a story and everything but I made something, very, very ,very basic for now.

This is the structure I have in mind:

1. Main menu (title, Set Sail, How To Play)
2. How to play screen (explains the game) with a back button
3. The map, where the ship sails island to island
4. A fight when the ship reaches an island
5. Win or lose screen with a play again button

Uncertainties:

I have not decided what the fight is. There is a monster on every island and beating it opens the next route, but the rest is open. One version is clicking the monster a set number of times before a bar runs out, which is simple and would work. The other is the monster throwing things while you move the ship left and right to dodge, which is more fun and a lot more to build, and it needs collision detection, which I have not done before. I will probably build the clicking one first so there is something playable, then upgrade it if I have time.

I also do not know whether the player should steer the ship. Right now it sails on its own, which looks good and is where the character of the Assignment 3 piece comes from, but between fights the player has nothing to do. I would rather keep the self sailing and hand over control only during a fight.

There are three things I want in it that I have not started yet. I want the player to build their own character at the start instead of being handed one, and to design their own flag, which would replace the little red triangle already flying on the ship’s mast. The third is the monsters. I want them generated the same way the islands are, out of rules rather than me drawing each one by hand, so you do not know what is waiting on an island until you reach it. That would also mean the fights stay different after you have played a few times, which the map already manages and the rest of the game does not.