Self Study #4.2

WIZARDWIZARD: As divine punishment from the wizard king, two opposing wizards are combined into one. You play as John the Wizard and Gregor the Tormentor, two wizards that share the same body and you must use your two magic wands to battle through the punishment gauntlet to free your bodies before they are lost forever. You are able to cast Gregor’s fireball spell to inflict damage and knockback on enemies (and yourself) as well as John’s ice magic to create temporary shelter or terrain to move on, but be careful because you have limited mana that both spells will drain. Use these spells to rocket jump around arenas, create terrain for creative movement and defeat bosses and enemies in this first person shooter souls like.

The target audience would be… me. I want this game to exist, I love movement shooters and really hard games. I want unhinged, zany and weird and wizards catch that aesthetic exactly.

As for the prototype, I really want to nail the gameplay feel (crisp movement and rocket jumping as well as the different spells from each wand) and aesthetic direction (I want PS1 style graphics, but broken up with a mixed media feel) (I want a boss battle where the enemy is a PNG image of a horse. This is a requirement and I will not budge on this)

Dowse or Die: You have been stranded in the middle of a desert with nothing but your trusty dowsing rods, and you are getting very thirsty. Use your dowsing rods to find the nearest source of water and replenish yourself before you die of thirst. The gameplay will be in first person, with the player holding out dowsing rods that rotate and move to the nearest water source, however sometimes they will move because of the wind, momentum or will misalign themselves. The player will be in a desert environment and will have an endless loop of finding plastic water bottles until either the player gets bored (and gets a high score) or dies of thirst. Water bottles will spawn further away and in harder to reach places as time goes on. The graphics will be dithered and stylised as akin to games such as The Return of the Obra Dinn.

The target audience for this game will be younger casual gamers, or just me. I think the concept of dowsing is funny so I want to make a game about it.

I want to focus on nailing the shader and graphics style as well as making the simple gameplay loop, maybe if time permits focusing on writing an algorithm to determine harder and harder places for spawns - basically find a way to increase difficulty without being unfair or arbitrary.

[ ] todo: add more of the images from my original google document.