Send It Over!

• Team members: Aaron Salenga
• Provide an overview of your game (give a short description about the game, i.e., core mechanics, game plot, objective, etc.): The game follows two player-controlled astronauts who have crash-landed on an alien planet and find themselves stranded. With both of their spaceships crashed, pieces of the ships are scattered throughout the map. They must gather these pieces and bring them back to their respective ships to reassemble them and escape the planet with their lives. However, the two astronauts have been (conveniently) separated by a central barrier that runs along the entire length of the map, preventing them from directly reaching each other and all of the scattered ship parts. Each ship piece is designated to go to either astronaut 1’s or astronaut 2’s ship, so both players must find a way to get these pieces to each other and back to their ships, despite the fact that the barrier prevents them from crossing over to each other’s side of the map. Each ship piece is of a different color, and the central barrier happens to have a series of different colored gates. These gates only allow the passage of same-colored ship pieces, so players must communicate and coordinate their efforts to throw ship pieces across to each other through the gates. While gathering ship parts, the astronauts must also defend themselves, as the hostile aliens of the planet—which are also color-coded—are closing in on them. The astronauts die if an alien manages to come in contact with them. The astronauts are not defenseless, however, as there happen to be ray guns of different colors among the scattered ship parts. Each alien is vulnerable only to ray gun blasts of the same color, so the players must use the ray guns to shoot at the aliens. The ray guns may also be thrown through the central gates, in the event that the player on the other side needs a specific-colored ray gun to defend themselves. As such, the game’s core mechanic is the act of picking up and throwing objects (whether it be ship parts or ray guns) across the central barrier. The objective of the game is to get all ship pieces (which are indicated as belonging to player 1’s ship or player 2’s ship) to their respective ships, before they are killed by the oncoming alien enemies.
• What will be the main technical components (game AI, motion planning, physics, procedural content generation) that your game will focus on? The primary technical components of the game will include motion planning, physics, and procedural content generation. Motion planning will be implemented for the enemies to find a path to the players; physics will be necessary to determine velocity and acceleration of moving agents and thrown objects; and procedural content generation in the form of perlin noise will be used to generate terrain that will affect the movement of the agents.
• What game engine/tools/libraries will your game use? The game I’m creating will be using Phaser as the physics engine. Consequently, I will code the game using JavaScript.
• Why do you think your game is interesting/exciting? I think my game is interesting because it revolves around color-based gameplay; nearly everything in the game—the spaceship pieces, the ray guns, the enemies, the central gates—takes into consideration the color of objects that are interacting. Additionally, my game will require players to cooperate effectively in order to succeed, so the amount of chemistry (or lack thereof) that players have with each other adds to the unpredictability of the gameplay.
• How would you divide the tasks among your team members (if more than one)? I am working on this game by myself, so I will be handling all tasks to finish this game.