Week 2 – Survey Results
The Results
Part of the project was to do research in the form of a survey, the kinds of games people play and what they expect from them. My survey was conducted electronically HERE (new results will not be considered). I now have enough results from the survey, with surprisingly round numbers, with 25 responses, comprising of 15 boys and 10 girls.
The most apparent observation is that most females classify themselves as casual gamers and play less than 2 hours of games a week where as males on average play around 4 hours of games a week. Another clear and more useful outcome is that almost all responses said that Game-play and mechanics are the most important aspect of the game, with graphics and story line being equal second and audio with no votes at all.
The things that people said they would like to see most in a game are interesting new mechanics, smooth graphics and audio that isn't irritating.
The plan
After ditching the falling blocks idea (see the prototype last week) I have decided to go with my idea for a space based RTS (Real Time Strategy). The aim of the game will be to build up your armies and bases around planets and expand your empire to, and protect it from other planets. To introduce a twist to separate it from other similar RTS games, all planets will orbit a sun, meaning that at different times planets will be different distances from each other effecting the travel time and fuel consumption. I plan on doing the graphics of the game in a simple line art kind of style, with mainly white on black and some colors to identify different factions and for special effects.
Overall the game will be a unique blend of Age of empires, Sins of a Solar Empire and Asteroids with some extra mechanics thrown in. I think this covers most of what people said they would like in the survey, having a unique new game-play mechanic, simple but effective graphics and hopefully some ok auido if I can pull it off.
Some things that I would like to incorporate into the game if I have sufficient time are games that can span multiple solar systems and some kind of content sharing system for people to share custom ship/system setups for people to play. For a name, the only one I have come up with as of yet is Saga of Sol which I think sounds ok.
For next weeks post I hope to have some screen-shots of a basic system viewer for showing an overview of a solar system.
Leave a comment