Ghost Driver
Ghost Driver is a small demo of a game design for a Video Games Design unit at Southampton Solent University.
Intro
For this project, we were placed into teams of 3 and told to create and design a small game idea which could be made into a couple of levels for a demo to show off the game’s concept.
A small game demo in which I was the primary developer of the game’s systems and art style as well as serving as producer and narrative/mechanic design. I helped design the UI menu’s along with the game’s mode splitting from a first-person exploration to puzzle game for each sub-area.
My Contribution
For the game, I was the sole implementer of the game’s artwork and coding. My team did not feel they had experience enough with code and art to get that heavily involved and so helped out in the form of grey boxes and level designs. For this reason, the game’s art style is fairly rudimentary and simple. I tried to focus on something clear but clean where possible and with a stylised goal in mind.
During the project I also helped out my team design-wise by creating the UI designs and writing the game’s narrative as well as discussing with them as a team the ideas for the gameplay which we settled upon and iterated together.
Shown in the previous two examples are the game’s two “modes”. Creating this game proved an interesting challenge design and coding wise as I needed to create two separate and distinct gameplay styles.
One being a First-Person Exploration game. And the other being a tile-based puzzler. Both my art and code needed to reflect these two separate areas and when it came to the narrative, I had a fun challenge in attempting to tie the two together.
The Project
The entire team was important for inputting their ideas, iterating on ideas, and providing feedback. But management of the GDD fell to me as during the projection my team had some issues with layout and formatting and asked me to try and collate their stuff suitably.
During the project we would have daily short meetings to just get up to speed with how it was going on and I would perform document maintenance based on this as well as during our once-a-week project meetings.
The final in-progress GDD for the project is embedded below.
Most content contained within is created by me with specific attention on sections such as control diagrams, concept art, and narrative which were done solely by me. Level Designs were all created by my teammates.
For a more in-depth exploration of the game see the video embedded below. This is a full game walkthrough showing the demo in it’s entirety.
The demo itself is also downloadable and playable from Itch.io through the following link.
And finally, my contribution to the project itself can be see on the project’s repo linked below.