Fruit Battle 1.0 - A broad Introduction & core mechanics

High Concept:

Genre: First-person Shoot-em-up

High Concept Statement:

With one gun, three bullet types, players have to shoot the enemy with the correct bullet. Otherwise, they will be stronger.

Player Motivation:

Players have to try their best to survive this game as long as possible.

Genre:

First-person endless Shoot-em-up prototype developed with Unity.

Inspiration:

The game is inspired by Fruit Ninja and Plant vs. Zombies.

Target Audience:

The target age rating of the game is E 10+ based on Entertainment Software Rating Board. The game might be well accepted due to the fantasy cartoon art style and in-depth mechanics.

Unique Selling Points:

1. Players have to switch bullets quickly to match the zombies' type; otherwise, it will buff enemies.

2. One game only costs a few minutes, suitable for mobile platforms.

3. Absurd and comedic world setting: In the world of nobody is eating any fruit, the lack of vitamins and minerals sabotaged the whole human being's immune system from a deadly zombie virus.

Target Hardware:

The target platform is mobile devices.

Design Goals:

The primary purpose is to provide a game for submission, challenge, and fantasy. It uses an absurd world background with a quick and easy shoot-em-up type to differentiate from other similar games.

prototype showcase

Rational:

1. Comedic shoot-em-up might be more interesting to play

Fruit Ninja and Angry Bird's success demonstrated a potential market for putting an absurd world setting with straightforward gameplay.

2. Be experimental with the current genre and add more interactions

On the other hand, many shoot-em-up games always differentiate others from gun types, level designs but less on mechanics of projectiles. The mechanics of shooting the expected bullet added a thinking layer before the player pressed the button to produce the target aesthetic goal - challenge. The new projectile mechanics also added a layer of interaction between enemies and players, creating a dynamic handling challenge with precise bullet and target control. Therefore encourages mastery of the game instead of easy fun acquired with repetitive shooting.

Gameplay and mechanics

The prototype is designed with four core systems that administrate the overall game: 1. Game manager: game manager system controls the overall game pace, such as the current level, current player status, countdown, and condition handlers such as winning and losing.

2. Player controller: player controller handles player inputs such as switching bullets, shooting bullets, player attributes such as movement speed and attack speed.

3. Spawner: enemy spawner handles the functionality of spawning enemies, props

4. UI manager: handles UI interactions such as buttons, feedbacks, and showing, hiding information at the right time

The core mechanics of fruit battle is moving and shooting. Combat mechanics are differentiated from other FPS games in that shooting the matching bullet will deal a significant amount of damage. Otherwise, it deals minor damage, buffs enemies, therefore, increases the game's aesthetic goal of representing challenge.

Rational:

1. Increase the sense of challenging through mechanics iteration rather than tweaking numbers and difficulty.

2. Stretch the gameplay limits of FPS: Usually, most FPS games emphasize targeting precision, various weapon types from melee to long-range, constant or discrete damage calculation, but less on how bullets as an element interact with the overall gameplay. Fruit battle 1.0 is designed to experiment with the projectile to see any exciting gameplay that can be added to the genre.

Overall combat flowchart

The core gameplay is an example of utilizing Games of Progression based on Jesper Juul's theory which provides players with fixed level attributes such as enemy quantities, fixed and constant maps. However, for better design quality, the mechanics will iterate to emphasize more on emergence through these mechanics changes:

1. The early difficulty will no longer need to match fruit bullet type that all three bullets will deal direct damage to enemies. Three bullets will have unique projectile mechanics in order to create in-depth gameplay. For example, mango will deal more damage to enemies.

2. With increased difficulty levels, there will be randomly generated enemies or bosses that need the bullet-match mechanics to create and increase the emergence level of the game.

3. More positive enforcement for utilizing the mechanics should be implemented, such as if the player shoots the correct bullet to the enemy, he/she will get a buff based on the bullet type.

Here is the correlation between bullet, correct matching reward, and enemy buffs

Bullet Type	Correct Matching reward	Wrong Matching Enemy buff	​Effect on normal enemies
Mango	Increase the damage that any bullet dealt for X seconds	Increase the damage of the enemy dealt to player for 5 seconds	Deals 100 damage
Apple	Increase the player movement speed for X seconds	Increase the enemy movement speed for 5 seconds	Deals 50 damage and shoot faster
Kiwi	Give player a temporary shield that can avoid 100 damage from any source for X seconds	Increase the enemy maximum 10 hp with a maximum cap of 100	Deals 50 damage and give a debuff that makes enemy vulnerable