Design Document:
I Wanna Be The Delivery Guy

Game Settings, Game Design, Level Design,
Enemies & Interactions

Background

The world in the game is divided into 3 parts, the city, the underground, and the lands. The way from the underground to the city is full of danger, but the information must be delivered to prevent the chain of suspicion appears. Therefore, there is a sacred job since the worlds exist, that is, the delivery guy, who has to find his way up to fulfill the sacred task.

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Game Settings:

States

A state machine is set with enum: instruction, start, game, pause, win, lose

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Collision checks
The idea is to check the movement the character is trying to accomplish beforehand; if the movement will cause a collision with the blocks in the collision map, then ignore the movement input, otherwise, move the character in the game world. In other words, all movements will need to pass this before implementation.

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Timer

The time limit to complete the game is set to 2 minutes.

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Gravity

Gravity is set to 10 (the character is keeping moving downward by 10 per frame if not on the ground). When the character is jumping, climbing ladders, or floating, gravity is set to 0 and back to 10 after the action or the power-up effect is finished.

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Movement

Character move left/right or climb up/down the ladder based on its row speed and col speed, which are set to 1. So, the character’s position in the game world will increase or decrease corresponding to the speed.

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Jump

Jumping is achieved by moving the character 15 towards left or right and 24 upward in the game world. It lasts 25 frames.

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Teleporter

A pair of devices that will teleport the character after encountering the entrance one by setting the character’s coordinate in the game world to another.

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Cheat

There are doors in the game and corresponding keys to unlock them to use the shortcut ladder, which acts as a cheat to make the game easier.

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Power-ups:

Super jump

A power-up that allows the character to jump higher temporarily (25 toward left or right and 50 upward). It lasts 120 frames.

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Float

A power-up that will float the character (keep moving upward by speed 1 if no obstacles are encountered), the player can control the character to move towards left or right at the same movement speed, but no other inputs are allowed. It lasts 130 frames.

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Extra life

An item gives the character an extra life in places that are difficult to access.

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Game Design:

All the designs are done surrounding the core experience.

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The target gameplay experience is to throw the player in a highly intense environment, with no space for relaxation but focus on the game, and need to think, make decisions quickly and play carefully. Meanwhile, the player will need to keep learning and adapting as they discover new environments and obstacles along the way.

Hence, different items with different effects that need the player to figure out how they can help to proceed forward are designed correspondingly in different levels. Also, a countdown timer is set to shorten the decision period and increase the intensity.

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Moreover, a life system is implemented instead of checkpoints for each level because it can create high-value rewards (extra life) that increased the choices required for the player to make in a limited time.

Also, if the character lost all its life, the player will be forced to restart the game. Therefore, it requires players to play precisely and intentionally under pressure rather than just spam inputs.

There is a delay for each jumping input after the first one because it is a quite ‘powerful’ movement that allows the character to escape from enemies and overcome obstacles, and the delay is to make it scarce to force the player to use it precisely.

Level Design:

Levels are designed to provide different feelings that can enrich the player's experience.

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The environment is designed to be intuitive, so players can know clearly where they should go next and have a smooth movement flow across levels.

Also, the levels are designed for the player to choose whether to use the cheat or not and to pick up the extra life or not, both sides will come with risks. This is to let the player have a sense of control and the degree of freedom to make choices. The conflict is that they must do it under pressure, and the time limit of power-ups and the game, so that the intensity is increased with the tasks that have to be completed in a short time period.

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The first level is for guidance, implying the gameplay mechanics, input logic, the style of levels, and how to use the cheat.

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The second level is to introduce most of the enemies and power-ups, the peak of the difficulty on the player's learning curve.

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The last level is to let the player use all they learned from the previous levels with a little something new.

Enemies & Interactions:

Since the character is just a messenger, to maintain the verisimilitude, the game is designed to encourage the player to avoid enemies by not giving any abilities or weapons to fight back, and if the character collides with enemies, one life will be deducted.

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To keep the consistency in gameplay, the character picks up power-ups by colliding with the item or the objects in the game world (ladders, teleporter) to interact with them directly rather than requiring another key input.

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There are two types of enemies:

1. Forever patrolling in an area
   The path of patrol and movements are fixed, easier for the player to dodge and predict actions.
    

2. Static and attacks with a certain pattern
   The player has to learn the attack pattern to avoid damage.

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There will be invincible frames for the character after collision with enemies.

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#All art assets are from creators on itch.io and used in this project for educational purposes