W. Andrew Stone COSC 460 Project Proposal The name of our game is called Removal of Corruption, however, this title will likely change as the game progresses. Members of the group include Brian White along with Amy Lynn doing 2-D art, and Lamar Peoples covering all of the Audio for the game, and me, Andrew Stone, as project lead/writer/and lead programmer. Both Brian and Amy will also be supporting programmers for the game. We are creating the game in XNA with using 2-D animation with the outside goal of making a portion or a level in 3D animation. Originally, we had planned to make a game about World issues and economics. The first fleshed out idea had something to do with the current recession and the possible causes. The game would consist of the player being a Banker (mortgage loaner) and shooting money at persons/objects (objects being institutions or commercial businesses, etc...) passing by. The object is to give money to right persons/objects as indicated by a particular color or look (depending on how we'd like it to look graphically-something that may come out in usability testing). By avoiding subprime borrowers the character's score, ultimately the nation's economy, will increase thus making the recession go away. The game is more of a statement than a training or education how-to exercise for helping the United States through the recession. More research on what exactly happened to cause the financial crisis and the effects of it is necessary in making an accurate game. So, the statement we'd like to make is that there needs to be more care or regulation (or something else that we find in our research) in the banking industry in order for this sort of thing not to happen.
As progress with the game proceeds, we may have another more specific idea come into fruition that would make the game more unique. For example, we already have toyed with the idea that instead of loaning money the player instead shoots money to five different categories (residential, industry, commercial, environmental, in social/recreational) order to maintain a balance of the overall budget for the economy. The player can then collect interest that will increase the happiness of the community. If the player ignores or misses too much for one of the categories, the environment changes and obstacles try to hinder the player, which could lead to the player losing the fight for the balance of the economy. For example, high spending in residential could give benefits to other categories, but low spending could spawn some sort of negative crime based obstacle, industrial could increase the chance of random coins generated if high, but if low could have some sort of unemployment based penalty. The idea being that all of the categories give bonuses when high and penalties when low but you never have enough money to keep anything too high. So, the mechanics themselves explain the educational and conceptual concepts being brought about by the game more so than the imagery and story associated with them. The game Sim City is similar in the categories that the player has to monitor. We also will use games we've created in the past as aid in the programming. We'll differ from our previously created games by adding ...