Flatlands

Will Maclean

Idea: to create a game where the audio is as core to the gameplay as the visuals.

Flatlands is a game where the player aims to interact with various other entities to hear their songs. Each type of entity will have a different genre of music, and different individual entities play different individual songs. The player must upgrade their relationship with individual entities to be able to hear their songs. Also, some of the entities move quickly! The player needs to keep up with the entities if they want to hear the full song. This will require quick navigation of the terrain, as well as upgrading movement abilities such as digging, swimming, and flying.

Themes

There won't be an extensive storyline in Flatlands, so instead the game must be appealing to a player in other ways. Namely, I aim to have a rich visual and auditory experience.

• VISUAL
  • pixel art
  • particle effects
  • day/night cycle
• AUDIO
  • interesting background music
  • focus on piano music

TODOs:

• Animated sprites
• More efficient sprite management (instead of loading the same sprite inside each entity/tile)
• Add sound functionality
• Add songs to entities
• Add different biomes to house the different entities
• Add different entities
• Create library of music to be used by the different entities
• Add swimming and flying
• Add upgrade system to different types of movement (running, swimming, flying, mining)
• Add relationship dynamic between player and entities
• Upgrade entity songs to be partial based on relationship level between player and entity. This will require convering the basic audio files to MIDI files, and adding the ability to incrementally add/remove notes from a song as the relationship between the player and the entity changes.

Undecided Parts

• How does the player upgrade the relationship between itself and the entities? Feeding? Side quests?
• What's the "endgame"? i.e. what is the player striving towards? Is there an end to the game and if so, what is it?
• What to do when there are multiple entities? Should all entities play their songs over each other? Or should the player decide somehow whose song they want to listen to?