Technical Game Designer
Parliament Parody
Game for College Lasalle Tech Week 2024 GameJam judged by Room 8 team.
The Jam was 24 hours long
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Parliament Parody: https://saryatkhan.itch.io/parliament-parody
Design Overview
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The game is a simple shooter with a time attack.
The theme for the jam was "Apocalypse causing polarization amongst people." We took this theme literally by turning it into polarizing politicians debating climate issues on the brink of causing an apocalypse.
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The game mechanics involve you shooting down other politicians' speech bubbles to counter their arguments. You have to shoot the bubbles and not let them touch the ceiling, which depletes one of your lives.
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The level you play in is a semicircular parliament, and you are at the podium in front of all politicians.​​
The politicians generate randomly in those given seats and in a spread fashion. So all bubbles don't bunch on a side.
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As this is a score-based, endless game, it has multiple factors to escalate as you progress.
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The number of politicians.
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The number of politicians speaking at the same time.
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Rate of speaking.
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Different types of bubbles.
Technical Implementation and Iteration
​​Player Character
Character mechanics include aim and shoot.
The shooting was initially implemented as a hit scan but later converted to a projectile, as it gave more depth to hitting the speech bubbles with your bubble to counter an argument.
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After playtesting, we discovered that players could exploit shooting infinitely to generate enough projectiles to fill the whole level and, in turn, randomly destroy the speech bubbles.
To overcome this, I implemented the overheat mechanic in the shoot.
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After every shot, a value is added to the variable ShootOverCharge, and a timer is started for cooldown if it is running already.​​
ReduceOverchrage Function
Now if the player keeps shooting continuously, the ShootOverCharge increases over time; once it reaches 1, the player has a cooldown time of 2s before they can shoot again.
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This workaround worked very well with the design of the game, so now players have to keep the overcharge in mind and give it some time before firing a lot of shots at once.
