KissesGAM400
Game Design DocumentSemester 7
Gameplay
High Concept
Target Audience and Rating
Marketing Comparison
Animal Crossing
Harvest Moon
The Sims
Business
Schedule
Core Development Team
Budget
Game Mechanics
Title Screen
Menus
Button
Dropdown Box
Image
List Box
Slider Bar
Text Field
Villages
Generation
Time
Weather
Igloos
Resource Gathering
Villagers
Generation
Energy
Health
Attributes
Needs
Targets and Actions
Items
States
Bedding
Clothing
Fireplace
Grilling
Melting
Social Interaction
Friendship
AI
Yetis
Game Screen
Saving and Quitting
Controls
Tutorial
Content
Menu Flow
Play
Display
Audio
Credits
Time
Base Weather Types
Temperature Modifications
Wood
Fish
Snow
Food
Water
Villager Movement
Bedding
Clothing
Grillers
Melters
Targets and Actions
Self
Item
Igloo
Forest
Hut
Mine
Bedding
Fireplace
Griller
Melter
Villager
Event Sentences
Time
Subject
Predicate
Action
Yetis
Yeti View Distance Scales
User Interface Controls
Gathering Locations
Buildings
Scenery
Villagers
Yetis
Wood
Fish
Snow
Food
Water
Constant Furniture
Trophies
Bedding
Grillers
Melters
Art Resources
Models
Billboards
Sound Effects
User Interface
Villagers
Yetis
Environment
Music
Gameplay
Kisskimo, the village cupid, has appointed you, an ordinary everyday villager, to spread joy throughout your village. It is your mission to maintain as many friendships as possible with your fellow village members, and luckily you have been promised rewards for showing progress in this task. At first, it seems that it should be easy enough to be friendly with your neighbors, but soon you learn that they are not fond of sharing your friendship with others. Their jealousy runs deep into the village’s social network and you are only able to achieve your goal by spreading lies and manipulating your friends.
While you may be cold hearted enough to take advantage of others, you definitely don’t have much time to do so. There is so much to be done during the day in order to stay healthy, and without your health, there will be no one willing to talk to you. Constantly getting hungry and thirsty, you must cook above the fire at home, but what are you to cook? Only by gathering wood to start a fire and finding some fish to cook over it, can you satisfy your need for food. You probably also need to grab some snow for melting while you are out, but if you stay outside too long in a storm you might freeze. Perhaps you only fear the cold at first, but it’s the yetis that thrive in the wilderness that will truly scare you away.
Having once lived the simple Village life, it will take time to adjust to your new situation. You once worked to survive a single life and perhaps maintain a friendship here and there, but you must now support as many friends as possible in addition to yourself. You can only hope that the rewards you receive as you progress up the ranks of society will allow you to impress your friends with fancy presents and a fresher look of health on your face.
High Concept
Kisses is a social strategy game in which the user must persevere physically and flourish socially in a Village.
Target Audience and Rating
Kisses has a target audience of teenage males and females. Its focus on social interaction will help it appeal to both of the sexes. Similar to the target audience, Kisses has a target rating of “Teen” due to its potentially more mature implications.
Marketing Comparison
The market for socially oriented games has been steadily growing over recent years. There is still enormous room for expansion in the genre and many games are in development trying to take advantage of all the available ideas to incorporate. Kisses contains unique features that none of its competitors have, and these features also give Kisses deeper socially oriented game play than can be found in its competitors.
Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing was released in Japan on the Nintendo64 as Animal Forest only to be later updated and released in the United States on the Nintendo Gamecube as Animal Crossing due to its success in Japan. The game also sold very well in the U.S. market. A second installment of Animal Crossing is supposedly in development at the time of this writing.
Animal Crossing focuses on controlling a single character in a village and owning a house. As the game progresses, the user can gain money referred to as Bells and use it to obtain new items, household decorations, and house expansions. The user’s interactions with other town members are fairly simplistic and focus on running errands and writing letters. Animal Crossing does make up for its lack of social depth with many side objectives consisting of collecting different types of items.
While Animal Crossing uses money to advance in society, Kisses focuses on relationship building. Kisses also has an in depth social network and functioning society, while on the other hand, computer controlled characters in Animal Crossing have little to no memory of anything, do not care about other interactions occurring in the village, and almost consistently remain standing in front of their houses. Kisses provides a much more believable experience due to all members of the village having to survive under the same conditions.
Harvest Moon
Harvest Moon has established itself as a successful franchise with ten released titles. New installments of the Harvest Moon series are also currently in development at the time of this writing. The goal in harvest moon is split between creating a successful farm, and getting married. The social interactions consist mainly of giving gifts. Characters are given preset likes and dislikes that are used to determine responses to gifts.
While the social interactions in Harvest Moon may allow the user to reach a higher relationship status such as marriage than the top relationship status allowed in Kisses, Harvest Moon does not have the breadth of social options allowed in Kisses. In addition to the number of social options, the reactions of computer-controlled characters in Kisses are built upon the current state of the dynamic society. The second key difference between Harvest Moon and Kisses occurs between the farming system of Harvest Moon and the gathering system in Kisses. By farming in Harvest Moon, the sole result is gaining wealth, whereas gathering resources in Kisses is a process of maintaining a healthy life style, thus affecting all of the user’s relationships. The third key distinction is Kisses’ goal to balance one’s efforts across multiple relationships compared to focusing on only one person in Harvest Moon.
The Sims
The Sims has grown to be one of the most recognizable games in the history of the industry. It has sold millions of copies and has shown to appeal to females slightly more than males. In addition to its initial release, it has been very successful with over five expansions and a massively multiplayer online game. Also, at the time of this writing, a true sequel to The Sims is under development.
The Sims focuses on watching over a family living in a neighborhood. The artificial intelligence controlling the family members is fairy simplistic and the user must often help them perform the chores of daily life. By getting jobs, a family is able to earn money to pay for food, bills, household items, and house expansions. The characters in The Sims also have the ability to build relationships with each other, but the characters themselves have little motivation to choose anyone as a mate based on anything besides astrological signs.
The main difference between Kisses and The Sims is the fact that in Kisses, the user has full control over a single character instead of just providing influences to the actions of multiple characters. Compared to The Sims in which the user is confined to the family’s house and can only invite neighbors to visit, Kisses also allows the user to leave his or her home and explore the surrounding world. Computer controlled neighbor characters in The Sims are not required to fulfill their needs and instead get to magically cheat their way through the, but the computer controlled characters in Kisses provide a more realistic experience to the user by actually playing by the same rules given to the user controlled character. The final key distinction is the in-depth social network found in Kisses that allows characters to remember events and actually talk about them and create paths of gossip in which information can travel.
Business
Schedule
The following schedule contains the first major milestones to be achieved in the development process.
Internal Engine Proof – Week 5 (9/29/2003 to 10/3/2003)
Description – The basic components of the game should be ready for use by the team. The modules that are covered in this milestone consist of Graphics, Sound, and Input.
Graphics:
The game should be able to render geometry. A Scene Graph class should be able to determine what objects are visible and make requests to the Rendering system to render the objects to the screen and in a self-decided order. The Rendering system needs to determine how to draw the objects according to an external description encapsulated in an FX-File object. The FX-File object needs to gather all the necessary rendering information from external FX files. The necessary rendering information consists of device render states, pixel and vertex shaders, textures, models and meshes, and any post-processing pixel shaders needed to render the object correctly.
The Scene Graph needs to gather object information about objects from the Object Manager module. The Object Manager module needs to provide the Scene Graph class with the position of any and all objects, as well as the object’s FX-File object.
In addition to 3D rendering, the game engine should be able to draw text on the screen. The font, scale, position, and color of the text should be able to be specified and the text should draw correctly on the screen under all combinations of the above parameters.
Sound:
The Sound module should be able to load and play static sound effects files as well as streaming background music. The files formats supported are WAV and MP3. Positional audio cues should be in effect so that a far-away object’s sounds are not as loud as sound effects from an object that is visible. Sound from the left should be louder from the left speaker and vice-versa.
Input:
The Input module needs to be able to track all input received by the application. It should be able to report any keyboard and mouse input that is active at that time; for example, what buttons are currently pressed and the mouse position.
First Engine Proof – Week 10 (11/2/2003 to 11/7/2003)
Graphics:
By this time, the static and dynamic 3D geometry should be rendering correctly. A small set of special graphical effects should be implemented as well. These effects consist of bump-mapping, dynamic reflections, and water.
Animated models should be able to be loaded from X files. They should be able to be properly exported from a 3D modeling package. Different animations should be able to be blended together at run-time during transitions. The models should be rendered with the textures and materials specified in their X file.
The level terrain should be uniquely generated according to the village’s name. The geometry should be present. Texturing and lightning of the terrain are not required for this milestone.
Physics:
The game’s objects should be modeled with correct physics. Dynamic objects should be able to walk around the level without getting stuck. Dropped objects should not go through the floor.
AI:
The AI should be able to walk around the level and reach its destinations.
Objects:
The objects should be created, stay around during game-play and then be deleted at game over without crashing the game or causing memory leaks.
The player object should be controllable by the player.
First Playable – Week 14 (12/1/2003 to 12/5/2003)
Description - A playable demo of the game needs to be ready for this milestone. The player should be able to control his character and perform all the actions needed to beat the game. The AI should be functional so that it will react to the player’s actions and accept or refuse joint actions.
The level terrain should be automatically generated depending on the village’s name and it should always be unique. All of the areas need to be in an appropriate part of the map and the player should be able to reach them. The terrain should be textured with images representing snow, wood, stone, dirt, and ice. The lighting direction and color is to change depending on the time of day in the game.
The dynamic moving objects in the world should be able to be rendered correctly as specified in their FX file descriptions. Their order of drawing should be properly determined by the Scene Graph.
The game should be playable in all target platforms. Any graphic techniques not available on a particular machine should be detected and appropriate fallback techniques should be used.
Core Development Team
Producer:
Alex Van Berg
Technical Director:
Gilberto Rosado
Product Manager:
Lewis Mohr
Designer:
Ryan Juckett
Budget
The following information is an estimated budget of development costs for a one-year development cycle assuming that the producer and designer are not also programmers on the side.
Name / Cost / Amount / TotalProducer Salary / $60,000/year / 1 / $60,000
Technical Director Salary / $60,000/year / 1 / $60,000
Programmer Salary / $50,000/year / 1 / $50,000
Designer Salary / $30,000/year / 1 / $30,000
Visual Studio .NET 2003 / $1079 / 4 / $4316
3DStudioMax 5.1 w/Character Studio / $3605 / 1 / $3605
Computer / $1500 / 4 / $6000
Total: $213,921
Game Mechanics
Title Screen
When the game first starts, the title screen is displayed. The game logo is rendered sitting in the snow with music playing softly in the background. After a short amount of time, an Villager will trot in from the right side of the screen until he is in front of the logo. This animation will be making use of the 3D engine in real time. The character will then turn to face the camera, tilt its head to the side in a puzzling manner, make a short Villager sound, and trot off the left side of the screen.
A short bit after the character leaves the screen, the game will automatically transfer to the menu stage. The title screen can also be skipped before the animation finishes by pressing the escape key, space bar, enter key, left mouse button, or right mouse button.
Menus
The music from the title screen will continue to play in the menus without resetting, and if the menus are left idle for a long period of time (in any menu state), the game will return to the title screen. The transition to the title screen will also cause no interruption of the music. When transitioning back to the title screen, the current state of the menu system will be forgotten. This will result in always entering the menus at the same spot from the title screen, which is a more user-friendly action when the application is being shown to the public in a convention like setting.
The user interacts with the menu system through a standard set of menu items. The functionality of the menu items will follow the standard functionality of similar items found in Microsoft Windows. All of the menu items are drawn on top of a blue background with snow falling down it.
Button
In general, each button will have a unique action that it performs. Some buttons might have the ability to transfer between different menus, while other buttons might have the ability to apply settings. The user can invoke the action of a button by clicking on its hit box. The hit box of a button is an invisible rectangle on the screen that is interacted with by the mouse cursor. The actual visual display of a button is made from a set of images. Different images can be displayed based on whether the mouse cursor is off the button, on the button, or on the button while being clicked. An additional image to display an inactive state is also used for some buttons. These different images will commonly be used to highlight a button when the mouse passes over it, and to show the button in a depressed state when it is being clicked.
Dropdown Box
A dropdown box will display a single line of text within a box corresponding to the actively selected item. A button with a down arrow on it will be to the right of the text. Moving the mouse over the text box or button will cause them to highlight, and clicking on either of them will open up the dropdown box. When in an opened state, the dropdown box will display a vertically scrollable list beneath the selected item. The list will contain all available items for selection including the selected item. If any items in the scrollable list or in the selected item box do not fit horizontally, the text will be appropriately cropped at the box’s border. Clicking on an item in the list will select it as the active item in the box, while clicking anywhere on the screen that is not part of the drop down list will close the list without making a new selection.
Image
Basic images are used purely for decoration.
List Box
A list box consists of a vertically scrollable list of elements. One element in the scrollable list can be selected and is displayed in a special highlighted form to reflect its state. The unselected elements in the list will be displayed in a normal state. When the mouse is over a normal element, it will highlight appropriately. Note that the highlight effect of rolling the mouse over an unselected element is not as intense or vibrant as the highlight effect that the currently selected element has. By clicking on an unselected element, it will become the new selected element in the list.