The game design document is included below:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uHihH_u6szZPzg76bCL24S1W5DD3adiPAm8YBN0vkZ4/edit?usp=sharing
Thomas: Actually doing the game design and working on the document was a lot of fun. It's been some time since I've been able to properly flex my creative muscles in an academic setting, and this was a great opportunity to be able to do so. Dan and I already knew we were going to make a game that was somewhat Bingus-related due to a longstanding and continued inside joke at the OIT helpdesk, where I was a coordinator with Dan up until I started PCEP. Having the initial idea of "something to do with Bingus" gave us a lot of freedom with what kind of game we wanted to design. The name Bingusquest was originally thought of, and we were planning to do a full top-down RPG style of game, but I'm incredibly pleased with what we came up with. I also managed to sucker my partner, Chloe Maharg, into drawing some assets for us that's seen in the design doc. They perfectly encapsulate the style we're trying to go for! If given the time and opportuninty, I'd absolutely do more design and make a fully fleshed out game. The ideas and design that we did are somewhat silly, but I fully believe that this could become a great game.
Dan: As Bart has said multiple times in class, design is the fun part. As a person who enjoys creative pursuits (I write and arrange music as well, when given the time and opportunity), this was an extremely fun opportunity to stretch my creative muscles in a new way. The title "BingusQuest" and the mental image of a little sphynx cat in a wizard hat and robes were the seeds for everything, inspiring a high-fantasy RPG-style design. However, since such games are primarily story- and character- driven, neither of us were writers, and neither of us were sure what an interesting prototype or twist of that might look like, we brainstormed some more. The addition of tower defense elements was partially inspired by Pokemon Tower Defense, but BingusQuest would have a much stronger blending of the two genres; the player's quest progress would partially dictate the difficulty of the next tower defense section, and the player's performance in those battles would influence the story. From there, we focused primarily on exactly how the integration of the two tropes would work and drew on common RPG and tower defense tropes to flesh out the basic gameplay. Keeping the game unserious also helped us enjoy development as we could have fun with silly names and character designs. Like Thomas, I am also interested in further pursuing this project if given time and opportunity!
Thomas: I definitely ran into some issues when working on the prototype. I haven't developed in Unity at all previous to working on this project (that's where the challenge for this comes from), and it was a lot to learn pretty quickly. As such, I worked on the first part of the prototype, the "town" section, as it was simpler than the tower defense portion of the game. I learned about player movement, scenes, assets, scripting, and interactions and collisions. YouTube tutorials were a great resource, and I went from knowing close to nothing about Unity to understanding some basic mechanics. It gave me a good foundational basis for development in Unity.
Dan: I had experience with Unity from previous classes and personal projects, but I had never worked on anything with as many moving parts as this tower defense prototype before. Figuring out where to put differenlt functionality was an interesting puzzle, which the sources linked below greatly helped with. Unfortunately, we were unable to finish this in time to get it playtested due to some personal issues on my part and forgetting to create a repo early on to let Thomas get started. However, due to having all the core parts of a tower defense experience, I believe this would be fairly easy to understand and build or improve on.
Tower defense scene code was heavily based on these tutorials:
Dan: I was in charge of exporting and playtesting as we were working past the deadline and I had more Unity experience.
The playtester immediately loved the visual style of the game as it was. In the town scene, moving with the arrow keys or WASD was self-explanatory, though they likely have that instinct from having played other games before. Starting the player on the far left of the screen in addition to the on-screen message to move right also help make it clear what the intended actions were for this demo.
Once the tower defense portion began, they panicked as the first wave appeared almost immediately (an accidental holdover from development and testing). Having the squares where new Bingus defenders could be placed light up when the mouse rolled over them was not enough of an indicator for what to do under the sudden stress. However, once they placed the first Bingus on accident, it was clear what the goal was. They enjoyed being able to place as many as they wished and watch them all mow down the waves of enemies.
Besides the clarity issues, their main want for the game was to have a big high-HP boss at the end to finish off the level. Overall, playtesting went well! Both the playtester and I could see that a full, completed version of this could be quite enjoyable.