Escape!

Escape! is a relatively simple 2D game which is being implemented in Macromedia Director by a group which I’m a member of, as a multi media project for ITN257.

The story is that the player is a prisoner of war which is being held in a jail, high up in the mountains, somewhere in the North Indian area. The player has to escape that prison, make it down the mountains, traverse a jungle and reach the beach where an extraction team is waiting but along the way the player has to overcome several deadly challenges.

The game is played in a similar way to games such as Zelda on the Game Boy. When traveling the player has a top-down view of the area and uses the arrow keys to move around. When he arrives at certain areas the game switches to a first person view and the player has to overcome the challenge using the mouse.

The following chart details the challenges of the first level inside the jail.

It breaks each challenge down to its atomic parts and the outcomes for the player for choosing one action over the other.

The next step in the development of the game was to draw a storyboard on paper for each part of the game.

This storyboard shows the actions the player has to take to overcome the challenge or the outcome of it if he fails.

We found this approach the easiest way to coordinate efforts and produce a somewhat consistent look across similar parts of the game. Some have to feature mainly hand drawn graphical content while other parts could be easier done using manipulated fotos or computer generated images.

This CGI image is used as background for a menu to let the player see that he is entering a vast and dense jungle (ok, only palm trees which isn’t so realistic but I didn’t have 4 gig’s of ram to include other vegetation). Even though he will traverse the jungle in a 2D top down view, not in this 3D environment, this image should get his imagination going and give him a sense of location.