A Train in Vain

Okay folks, new orders from up top, time to get to work designing. Having just started my courses for this semester, the one that's probably going to be taking up most of my time is IMGD 3500 Artistic Game Development. The assignment: make an entire first person platformer level from scratch in Unity, and make it look damn pretty. Best get to the old drawing board.

I don't know a lot of details quite yet, I've only just begun to play around with Unity outside of cats pawing at it idly last semester, so I've got some work ahead of me on that front. For right now, all I've got is that it will consist of at least one interior space, a larger exterior space and a bridge somewhere in the mix. There is definitely more detail to come, so laying anything down in concrete terms is probably unwise, but we can start some preliminary planning right out of the gate to find a general direction for the later work.

The bridge seems like the best starting point, it's a concrete place to start, unlike the ephemeral concepts of "an interior and exterior space." A little free association off the word bridge turned up the phrase "rail bridge," like a bridge trains use to cross a river. Working out from here one can easily imagine a game set aboard a moving train, the conflict almost sets itself, a train is speeding out of control, and the player must reach the locomotive to stop the train. The trains increasing speed can be used to create a nice difficulty curve and impart a sense of rising tension, and the player can move amidst both the interior and exterior of the train fleshing out the other two known requirements for the game.

Setting the game aboard a train also has the added benefit of keeping the action nicely contained, and suggest constant forward movement to the player. This also makes things developmentally simple as well, trains being highly modular, if a planned section of the train doesn't work out, just remove it and hook the previous section to the next part. If we want to get really devious we can have individual cars become uncoupled as the train moves along, perhaps setting a time-limit forcing the player to race across each train car, or at least make a long lead from one car to the next.

Seeing how this is an art class, let's keep the discussion mostly about the visuals. I'll keep these in general bullet point format, to keep me from over-committing to one idea.

• Colors commonly associated with trains: the black, white and red of train crossings as well as the warning yellow caution signs that alert people of their presence. Seems like a good pallet of urgent colors to let the player know they should keep moving. Perhaps tone down the reds and yellows though, I'm thinking some manner of rust color for the reds, and a drab, worn out taxi-cab yellow. Also some tinny metallic color might be a good idea too.
• Railroad tracks suggest a lot of intersecting straight-ish lines, possibly a motif that can be carried throughout?
• Perhaps the smoke from the chimney could serve as an indicator of the end goal? Perhaps wafts of smoke hinting a possible path forward.
• Stray thought here, title of the game should be A Train to Catch or something like that.

Well it's a good start anyways, at least for quickly jotting down some ideas. I still have to play with Unity a bit more to see what I can do, but it doesn't hurt to put some thought into now though.