Up and Running

I guess it goes without saying, but we registered for a blog on Blogspot.com so we have somewhere to keep track of our production status. Things are still in their early stages, but we figured out the general idea of our game in our brain-storm session after class today. The premise is loosely based off of Katamari Damacy in that the main focus of the game will be to gather items into a ball or some kind of shape; but unlike Katamari, which takes place on the Earth, our game will take place in outer space. Our game is set in the future (perhaps 2050, maybe even later) and the 'plot' is this: the population of earth has grown to a point where there is no longer any place to stash people's garbage. NASA comes up with the bright idea to start firing 'trash rockets' into space. The ramifications of this decision do not make themselves evident until many years and hundreds of trash rockets later. Eventually outer space becomes so cluttered that interstellar travel becomes an impossibility (I guess I should have mentioned earlier that humans have colonized different galaxies at this point in time in our game world). We haven't ironed out the specifics of the rest of the plot, but somehow Earth or some other nation develops an Intergalactic Sanitation Department whose agents use Black Hole Guns (or something) to round up the free-floating garbage in space. The player will assume the role of one of these Sanitation agents and his goal will be to gather the garbage floating around the stages while dodging obstacles and dangers like comets, stars, black holes, and space pirates. Other difficulties include time limits and the player's air supply. We plan to have realistic physics of gravity and interia that affect the player and his movement. The trash that the player collects will accumulate in front of the player, adding to his mass, affecting his movements, and eventually giving him his own gravitational pull. There will be certain excessively large pieces of garbage that can only be picked up when the player's personal ball of garbage meets a certain size. The game will be fairly linear, with a progression through different stages that gradually increase in difficulty. There will be a 'hub' stage from which all other stages are accessed through warpholes, but certain later stages can only be accessed once certain requirements have been met, which will add a degree of non-linearity. At the end of each stage, the player will be rewarded with money that can be used to purchase different upgrades (increased propulsion, etc.) There is also a plan to incorporate a multi-player aspect into the game, but we don't want to set our sights too high at this point. We decided that multi-player should take a backseat to getting the game itself built.

I think that's everything we covered in our brainstorm session today. We're meeting again tomorrow to finalize some of the specifics. I'm going to write up a formal proposal tonight so that my other teammates can review it tomorrow.
-Charles