Posted August 14, 2019 by Ruofu Sun
Donut Mania is designed to be a strategy-based party game where the inspiration comes from human being's crazy desire and impulsion to donuts. Apart from that, the feeling of being a shopaholic myself also help with decision-making. Just imagine the craziness of people when we try to get the best piece of clothing or anything with limited amount and sometimes we have to battle with other people if that is the last piece. With this bear in mind, the decision-making during developing this demo comes as following:
1.Player movement: since the whole game is built upon keywords like desire or impulsion, this should definitely be a fast-paced game. Thus a smooth and reactive player control is needed and the top-down view is selected since it can offer a much clearer view to both players' actions. As each player represents a box with a relatively rigid shape, the limitation to four directions makes more sense.
2. Collecting and dropping donuts: As orders are made in each round, players (boxes) need to collect enough donuts to meet the order by the end of each round. There is a size limit to each box and when the box is full, no more donuts can be collected. This forces player to think carefully what kind of donuts they should pick up and in what sequence. One major way to inflict donut loss is by hitting with each other. Depends on the speed and direction, if you get hit by another player, you will lose donuts while the other player will not. If you and the other player hit with each other face to face, both of you will drop donuts.
3. Interaction with environmental elements: the playground is designed to be set in a donut shop where donuts are baked and sold. Tables are used to provide height advantage to players. If one player gets on the table and waits for another to come close, he/she can try jumping off the table at the right moment and give another player a huge hit which results in more donuts lost. A conveyor belt is also added to transfer special donuts with different functionality at designed moment (see hints on the clock). This can adds more variations to the tension of the game play. Two types of trade machine are also added to trade for desired donuts.
4. Special donuts: Three types of special donut is available in the demo, more to be added in the future.
Speedy Donut ： temporarily increase the speed of yourself, will induce more donuts lost when hitting
Ninja Donut : steal the last two donuts from the other player's storage, need to make sure you have enough space to use
Confusor Donut : make your opponent confuse by messing around their movement control
5. Time constraint of the game: the demo is set to be 2 mins long for each round. When more features are added in the future, the time for each round will also be increased.
The main theme of this game is donut. Thus as the designer, I hope this game can look "delicious". Rich colors are used in which pink and yellow are chosen as dominant color and secondary color, respectively.
The animations associated with all kinds of objects need to be vivid and straightforward. Below are the animations associated with using the Speedy donut and the jump on/ off table
Feedbacks are more than welcomed! Thank you!