Potential Name: [DIENO]
Character: Dino
Synopsis
Our game is a chaotic reimagining of the classic Chrome Dino.
You still play as the same familiar dino, but instead of jumping over cacti, you’re thrown into a series of intense, overstimulating worlds the moment your WiFi cuts out. Each level pulls from a different digital universe, involving clashing art styles, unexpected enemies from various digital worlds, and constantly shifting obstacles.
As you progress, you collect weapons, armor, and power-ups to help you fight through whatever’s thrown at you. The game challenges players to react quickly, adapt to new environments, and destroy anything in their path. It’s fast-paced and a complete contrast to the calm simplicity of the original.
We wanted to take something everyone knows and flip it on its head, turning a quiet moment of internet disconnection into a high-energy, action-packed experience.
Our “Why”
The Chrome Dino game launched in September 2014 as a browser game developed by the Chrome UX team. The original game is a simple endless runner with the main character, the Dino, representing a joke that not having an internet connection is just like living in prehistoric Jurassic age with no technology.
The game’s original intent was meant to serve as an easy way to pass time as you reestablished your internet connection. Dino has been running endlessly for the past decade, trapped in a “prehistoric” environment with no tools or skills to help him on his journey. Jumping over cacti and ducking under pterodactyls is not enough of a challenge anymore for Dino— he’s ready to level up.
[DIENO] aims to create the opposite game to the original Chrome Dino. Players will encounter a wide variety of obstacles and enemies from foreign digital worlds with clashing art styles, collect weapons and armor to defend themselves, and earn special power-ups on their journey to avoid and destroy anything in their path. [DIENO] is for those who wish their WiFi interruptions were filled with overstimulating, challenging gameplay. Juxtaposing the simplistic and familiar character and base setting of Chrome Dino with complex challenges and engaging game dynamics is what excites us about [DIENO].
Added Features
Obstacles: Unlike the original game where the only threats are cacti and birds, [DIENO] throws a variety of unpredictable and fast-moving obstacles at the player. These include enemies from clashing digital worlds, dynamic hazards like falling objects or moving lasers, and environmental effects that force players to react quickly and adapt.
Power-ups: Players can collect power-ups throughout the run to boost their abilities. Some examples might include speed boosts, temporary invincibility, double jumps, or weapon upgrades. Power-ups add variety to each run and give players short bursts of advantage to survive more intense moments.
Various Mechanics:
- Combat system: Players can pick up weapons like laser blasters to fight back against enemies instead of just dodging them.
- Visual variety: Enemies and assets are pulled from different art styles to create an intentionally chaotic and over stimulating environment.
- Momentum-based movement: The dino’s speed may increase over time or based on power-ups, making the game harder the longer you survive.
- Score tracking: Players can try to beat their high scores based on distance traveled, enemies defeated, or power-ups collected.
Gameplay
At its core, [DIENO] is an endless runner. The player controls a pixelated Dino and must stay alive from the obstacles it is presented with.
Core Mechanics:
- Movement: Jump and move left/right to avoid fast-moving threats.
- Weapons: Collect weapons, some things we were ideating were: pixel swords, glitch bombs, or laser blasters to destroy enemies.
- Power-ups: Some ideas: speed boosts, temporary invincibility, double jumps, or weapon upgrades.
- Momentum: The longer you run, the faster and more unstable the game becomes—shifting art styles, changing enemy types, and increasing screen speed.
- Obstacles: We are keeping the cacti and birds maybe, but some new obstacles were falling objects or moving lasers, and environmental effects that force players to react quickly and adapt.
- Levels/Different Biomes: When the player moves up in levels the surrounding environment will change including maybe the enemies.
- Score Tracking: This is meant to foster competition for players among themselves to beat their old scores.
Together, these gameplay mechanics tell the narrative of Dino who must stay alive in this chaotic world.
Target Demographic
[DIENO] is for players who enjoy a challenge and crave a fast-paced, stimulating experience.
Our game is an endless runner game, designed for people who appreciate difficulty. But, we also value fairness so there are power-ups, weapons, and armor in the game that can help the player. To appeal to a more general audience, the game is also intended to be intuitive, so players can quickly get the hang of it. Although less narrative-driven, our game is built around mechanics like obstacles and power-ups to raise the stakes and keep gameplay engaging. We drew inspiration from the classic T-Rex Google mini-game, but we’ve made it more challenging with added mechanics and increased difficulty.
Art Style
[DIENO] will feature a mixture of different art styles across all assets, but its foundation will reference the original Chrome Dino game’s pixelated, retro aesthetic.
The character and base course will remain similar, but additional power ups, weapons, obstacles, and animations included into the game will include the following art styles:
- 8-bit (Chrome Dino)
- 64-bit
- Cartoon
- Sketch
- 3D
- Photorealistic
Challenges in building the game
- Core Gameplay & Physics
- Obstacle generation & pacing: Random or procedural obstacle creation must balance difficulty and fairness.
- Movement mechanics: Adding left/right movement and crouching complicates hitboxes and collision.
- Physics tuning: Jump height, gravity, speed scaling over time — all require fine-tuning for “feel.”
- Collision handling: Allowing left/right movement requires better collision detection, possibly including edge cases like brushing past obstacles or returning to an old screen position.
- Camera tracking: The camera will likely need to follow the player, which adds complexity if they can move backwards.
- We’re thinking of some sliding window system in which the window always moves at an increasing rate and the player can move within that window.
- Level Progression System
- Distance-to-score mapping: You’ll need logic to increase difficulty (e.g., faster speeds, more frequent spawns) as score increases.
- We still have to decide what is within our scope and how we want to differentiate our game through the higher difficulty modes
- Checkpoints or levels: Implement transitions, such as between different eras or biomes, without interrupting flow.
- This is to add some novelty and introduce some narrative through level progression and increase player fun through difficulty aspect.
- We plan to have this as an endless runner but at what point do we change difficulty, is it gradual or is it static with certain distance ranges that correlate to difficulty
- Distance-to-score mapping: You’ll need logic to increase difficulty (e.g., faster speeds, more frequent spawns) as score increases.
- Narrative Integration
- Story delivery: How do we want to tell a story? Just at the beginning with a blurb? Do we want to tell it through the levels and the environment? Is this something we want to put much emphasis on?
- Asset Management
- Animations and sprites: You’ll need character animation for multiple directions (run, jump, crouch) and potentially parallax backgrounds.
- We also need to either source or design these sprites ourselves, and depending on our choice of integration of different enemies, characters, environment obstacles, this can all create a bit of a challenge.
- This can pose a challenge when sourcing sprites as we want a consistent design language and aesthetic.
- Sound: Music, sound effects, possibly voiceovers — all must sync with events and not feel repetitive.
- Figuring out where to source this, what is fitting, what a potential background track could be.
- Animations and sprites: You’ll need character animation for multiple directions (run, jump, crouch) and potentially parallax backgrounds.
- UI/UX
- Score and other HUD elements must be clean and informative without cluttering the screen. We have to decide on how minimal or informative we want the HUD to be, but as of now just a single score that corresponds to distance.
- Ensure player controls operate well and without any delay or lag. Decide what buttons to use, just arrow keys, utilize the space bar, WASD, not sure.
- Scope
- A big challenge for us is to keep our ideas within a scope and deciding what are the most important and fun things for us to ass. With the limited scope of the length of time we have to make a MVP of this game, we want to make sure we decide amongst us what are going to be the most important features.
