HW 4

chapter 2
   I want the people who play our game to feel both a sense of responsibility for the villages he has to protect and satisfaction for being able to successfully fend of a horde of enemies.  The game should also be just difficult enough to illicit excitement and anxiety.
   I think the essential part of these experiences is the complexity and range of abilities and mechanics.  I want the game to be complex enough to be engaging and to have different abilities, like the main character gaining the abilities of an enemy, or different possible melee weapons and attacks.  I think adding elements of an rpg will help with this as we can add some complexity through stat building.  Another way to add these experiences is to make more interactions with the village and its people.  If we can have the main character arm and upgrade villagers to effectively take the role of a turret from more traditional tower defense games we can make the npcs more interesting.  Also having to speak to different villagers like a blacksmith for upgrades will add to the immersion in the experience.

chapter 3
    The nature of out game will be to send enemies at regular intervals to attack a village and equip the main character with various methods of defeating the enemies.  Surprise could take a role if we add elements of randomness in either what kind of enemies appear (werewolves alongside dragons for instance) or if we make the time interval between waves more random.  Players could then experience surprise if a wave comes earlier than they had planned.
   We can effectively create a fun experience by systematically and regularly giving the player new obstacles in each wave of new enemies that attack the town.  Maybe a certain set of upgrades would not be ideal for the next enemy, but the player has to make choices anyway not having perfect information of when the next wave will come or what exactly it will be.  Having lots of new and varied enemies will ensure that the experience will not become stale and will hopefully add enough surprise and variety to be fun. 
   The goal of our game is to create the experiences I talked about above.  If we're able to engage players and keep them excited throughout the game as they fight waves of enemies and interact with the NPCs in the village then we've met our goals.  I think players will be engaged and eventually attached to our game through the promise of regularly and expected new challenges.  With what will probably be regular intervals players can expect a new challenge that they can use new abilities on and also test what they've learned so far through the game.  The specific problem we want the player to solve is to use the limited resources we provide to the player at each interval of the game to solve the problem of each consecutive wave of enemies. 

This week I contributed to our game by beginning developing how to play a game with multiple enemies with one main character in blender.