During the brainstorming phase of the project proposal three main game ideas were considered. In no particular order they were the Squid Game Minigame(s), an FEH Themed Poptropica, and an FEH Themed Mario. The squid game mini games would have consisted of several minigames from the Netflix show “Squid Games”; such as, tug of war, cutting out a cookie, red-light green-light, etc. Next, the FEH themed Poptropica would have been a basic role-playing game with different stages with some end goal of “saving the world.” Finally, the FEH Themed Mario game was going to be an FEH themed adventure game with combat and movement mechanics inspired from the Super Mario Bros. franchise.
In order to evaluate these possible game choices, several criteria were used. These criteria included: Fun Gameplay, Original Concept, Meeting Rubric Criteria, Manageable Difficulty, Easy Division of Work, and appealing to the audience, which in this case is the FEH Student body and the typical college student.
Using these criteria, Squid Game Minigames were ruled out because they were limiting in scope and would have required a lot of predetermined game play which was determined too not be enjoyable. FEH Themed Poptropica was then ruled out due to the difficultly of implementing the complex graphics and storyline building.
The FEH Mario game was selected as the final game choice. This was because it would be a fun game, was easy to adapt to meet rubric criteria, easy to simplify, if need be, and would be easy to split up in an object-oriented fashion.
The proposed FEH Mario game is STOMP, a survival/adventure game where the player must defend themselves from monsters in an FEH themed world through strategic jumping. The game was proposed to contain several basic features such as, basic graphics, basic statistics, responding to touch, a main menu, the ability to replay the game, and would be a single-player game. It was also proposed for it to contain several advanced features such as arbitrary touch, resource tracking, Multiplayer 1 (simple enemy AI), Moving Objects including projectile motion and jumping, as well as a variable difficulty level based on user input. Furthermore, it was proposed that the statistics would be persistent across multiple games, the monsters would be randomly spawned, and the game would have advanced gravity and movement mechanics.