WHATEVER IT TAKES! Concept and pitch doc

WHAT EVER IT TAKES- BY MITCHELL COLEMAN

CONCEPT:

Your a homeless drug addict trying to turn your life around and become the boss of an organised crime racket in the suburb of balmain.

GENRE: I would say its role playing shooter (RPS)

GAMEPLAY:The player will be able to run,jump,shoot,aim,action button,steal,melee fight,buy things,dodge,roll,strafe and customise the look of character.

FEATURES:Obviously the game will have a lot of stuff that other RPS have but this game will have a sleep mode so if the player doesnt find a suitable place to shack up they will lose that days XP.

The player is a hobo with a knife and a heroin addiction (at first that is).He will have to avoid roaming gangs and police as well as steal or beg for food and drugs to stay alive.

There will be items of interest all over the map to upgrade your shanty house or weapons.

The artistic style of this game is grimy as all hell showing some of the shit homeless people have to go through from escape from being raped to cooking up road kill.

Once you form a gang and buy a front the real game begins from paying of cops to organising hits and defending your fronts from rival gangs.

The setting of the game is in balmain where I personally grew up and It will stay true to the characters I know and have met from scummy lads wearing polo and nautica to shit loads of women pushing prams.

The target audience is men from 15 to 30 years due to the concepts behind the game and will be able to be played exclusively on PS3 as all other platforms suck.

With a proper development team I estimate it will take 3-4 months and cost 500 grand.

The competition will be rockstar and saints row games along with any other RPS.

Obviously from reading this you have realised this is a fucking wicked game but in my opinion its well boss and me and my team are the ones to produce it!

Reflection

The idea of controlling tiles as the player moves through the board worked well and was the major strength of the game.
I thought the tiles all spawning soldiers was the critical moment when i realised some major changes needed to be done so that the game was more fast paced between players.
If i could go back in time with the knowledge i now know i would have play tested a lot more and documented each problem better and whether or not the players were enjoying themselves and at what point were or were not doing so.
Overall i have learned a lot from what i thought i was going to do and what i did.
The concepts and ideas from start to finish have evolved and are completely different from each other.
All in all it was a fun experience and i hope people enjoy my game!

Spec Sheet

• 15x Gang cards x 4 for each player (60 in total)
• 6 x 4 Soldiers for each gang (24 in total)
• 2 x dice
• 1 x board mat to place gang cards

1 x Skyscraper card (which is placed in the middle of board)
Basically a territorial acquisition game in which each player battles for dominance and control of the game tiles to acquire the middle card, THE SKYSCRAPER to dominate the city!

Market Research

After searching the web for similar ideas i found one http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3085/gang-of-four which was still very different but had a similar concept.
What inspired me was "transamerica" , "chess","settlers of cetan" and my class mates to tell the truth.

Design Changes

At first every tile controlled produced a soldier and before long the whole board was covered in soldiers and each player spent to much time moving them around.
Later i changed it so that only certain tiles produced "Soldiers" but the problem still occurred so finally i put a limit on the soldier count to 6 to resolve this issue.

I also had a maximum of 3 soldiers per tile at one time which caused all kinds of chaos and was recently changed to 2 soldiers per tile which runs much smoother then before.

There were plenty of minor changes i made when play testing to make the game quicker and smoother such as no diagonal movement, the intro of gang cards as opposed to simple tiles and the look and feel of the game in general.

TARGET

This game is basically about gang warfare so its aimed at an older audience 15+ is the target audience.

ORIGINAL IDEAS

The first idea i had was a drinking game called "Blind Man" which was basically about trying to get munted as opposed to staying sober and consisted of dice rolling to win if multiple players answered the game card questions correctly.


The second idea i had was also a drinking game called "Evaluate" which was basically the idea that each player answers questions and if the majority of the other players do not believe it they make them drink, the thing is the questions are very personal and are aimed at making the player feel uncomfortable and everyone else wet themselves with laughter.

The 3rd idea was basically the same as GANG WARS but used a hex grid as a board and had much more complex battling and took a
lot longer to play so i scraped it.