Team Concept Doc
Synopsis
It’s Big Game Week, and chaos is unfolding on Stanford’s campus. It’s been a long tradition for Berkeley students to attempt to sneak on campus to cause mischief and it’s our job to stop them.
As the rivalries intensify, Berkeley is carrying out an organized infiltration of Stanford campus by taking over one key location at a time. Their first stop is Flomo Dining Hall. You are Stanford’s last line of defense. You will take on critical roles on campus from tour guide to RA to dining hall doorman and ultimately to Stadium Security. Your mission is to protect Stanford territory by using all available information to identify Berkeley infiltrators, trying to blend in amongst the real Stanford students. You must carefully examine students’ ID cards, transcripts, GPA records, history essays, backpacks, and even SAT scores to determine who belongs to Stanford and who doesn’t. Each location will have location-specific time limits, and you must make split-second decisions that will determine the fate of our ownership of campus.
With each shift, your vigilance will be tested. If you accept too many Berkeley students or turn away too many real Stanford students, the location will fall to our rival school. From FloMo to West Lag to Farillaga, the stakes will escalate. All of your work will culminate into the powers that you have to protect Stanford’s stadium itself. If you are able to protect enough locations on campus, all of the RAs, dining hall staff, and tour guides from those locations will be on your side.
Can you protect Stanford’s honor and keep our campus our own? Or will the Berkeley Bears succeed in their invasion? The fate of our school rests in your hands. 😮
Tone
The tone of our Stanford vs. Berkeley game will start as a playful balance between light-hearted college rivalry and investigation. As the stakes increase throughout the levels, we will see darker and darker themes appear, from burnt trees to decapitated bears, we will see themes of sabotage and manipulation as Berkeley students try harder and harder to take over our campus. There will be a huge emphasis on the culminating Big Game, and our fate relies on it. The preliminary battles for territory will determine the number of supporting parties that we will have for the ultimate Big Game, and so the tone will be tense and get increasingly more so as time goes on.
Setting
The setting will take place throughout the entirety of Stanford campus and the player will attempt to defend all of campus in sections. At each level, the player will be positioned at one specific section of Stanford, starting at Flomo Dining Hall and making their way from West Campus to East Campus all the way to Stanford Stadium. The player will traverse campus and learn all about Stanford’s iconic architecture, spacious quads, and dining and residential areas. We have yet to design the order of the game but will continue to work on that through section and independent work time.
Gameplay
The gameplay generally will consist of a ‘Evaluate if this person is good/bad based on clues’ style, in a way similar to That’s Not My Neighbor or Papers, Please.
For those unfamiliar with this game style, it works in the following format. The player is posed with a binary ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (whether to accept this person or reject them), and they have some criteria to evaluate on and some manual/facts to refer to. For example, in Papers, Please, the user is admitting people into a fictional country, and they must ensure someone’s birthday, passport, etc. are all in check, else reject them (and it gets increasingly complicated as time persists).
For our security guard, the game will progress in a “locked”/”unlocked” location manner (this is still subject to change), where as the days progress, the location on campus that the user is responsible for/the context they are in changes, but the overall gameplay remains similar. For example, the user starts at FloMo dining, where they are making sure that someone is on a meal plan and has at least one swipe to be admitted to get dinner (rather simple), and then the last level has the player at Stanford stadium, where you have to check bags, IDs, contraband, etc.
Key Challenges
For the time window that we have to complete this project, the art will likely be a limiting factor. A lot of the code can likely be broken down into just a few functions (and features that can be turned on/off), but having multiple settings with a cast of characters, even if we allow ourselves to repeat them, could be a lot to handle.
We think we will try to get around this by having distinct characters and locations but making shortcuts here and there where possible (e.g. having one base character model, and then giving them a hat in one location, a tie and sunglasses in another, etc.).
Additionally, we are planning on going with a slice rather than an MVP, so we can really just prioritize making one or two levels and pour all our attention into those, rather than sloppily compiling all of them by the end of the quarter.
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