Project Name: Jail Break - Game
Skills: Macromedia Director MX 2004, Photoshop, Lingo
Project (Video Desktop Capture):
Background: The brief handed to me back in week one of the Scripting Interaction module by my tutor, gave me the task of reinterpreting and improving on a very basic game demo called “Chicken Run”; this demo had basic Lingo coding to make it function and not a lot of time had been spent on it’s surface, so I immediately started planning a strategy, a personal specification which would give me the basis to check back upon it and ensure that my artefact’s creation would be a smooth process.
The brief threw up some interesting ideas to consider when planning my original concept, I would need to make sure that the basic rules of ‘Chicken Run’ remained (moving a number of characters from one area to another avoiding potential hurdles or threats along the way), but I needed to improve on looks, smoothness of the design, creative music and sound effects, make sure the characters couldn’t move off the game screen, so I would need some sort of fencing structure in place to enable this and how the game would end and start.
My tutor showed me four previous final game solutions created by students the previous year and the one thing I noticed was that they all contained chickens, exactly like the demo’s subject matter, so I quickly decided there and then that my game setting, story and characters would be completely different and unique.
I debated between two ideas for a while, a Bank Raid game in which your mission was to break in to a bank and steal a treasure from the vault and the idea I finally settled with, which I felt could execute all of the itinerary of the brief; it was an idea about a jail escape, which I called ‘Jail Break’, this I felt would be perfect, especially with keeping the original idea of ‘Chicken Run’ in mind, I could have a number of prisoner characters, who all were trying to get to a safe haven like the chickens (escape to Mexico), these characters could be kept on the screen by fences (prison barbed wire ones) and they could come against various foes (guards, dogs, spotlights, CCTV cameras and soap).
Drawing on a combination of my own ideas and also prison based television and film productions I have watched in the past such as Prisoner of War movie ‘The Great Escape’ (Dir. John Sturges, 1969) and the popular SKY television programme ‘Prison Break’ (Created by Paul Scheuring, 2005), I came up with a storyline about two convicts escaping which would be played out over two levels, I decided to give each of these characters a unique ability to give them more purpose, one who could hack computer switches to open gates and help the characters progress and the other who could do more manual tasks such as bend fences with strength or knock out/kill guards on patrol, this added a degree of logic/problem solving to the piece which didn’t exist in ‘Chicken Run’ and which I felt would be more entertaining than simply marching from one end of the level to the other.
In terms of a target audience in mind I decided to aim at a slightly older age range, especially with the difficulty of the game and the subject matter of prison, looking to deliver the piece to people over the age of 11 years-old. I wanted my game to be gripping, fun, memorable, but most importantly a game in which you would feel like playing more than once, or one that you would want to complete should you be struggling to complete the levels, which in testing proved to be the case.
The video above shows the game at around week 8 out of 12, the final game is smoother and some of the finished visual have been increased in quality, you use the arrow keys of the keyboard to move!
