Laying Down the Base

Soul Furnace GDD

Target Audience – 10-12 years. This means they will have better hand-eye coordination to handle the difficulty/intensity of the game and will also be mentally mature enough to appreciate the narrative.

Platform – Computer (up, left, right and spacebar keys) but could be adapted to tablet format if the four buttons are on the GUI.

High Concept – Soul Furnace is an arcade-style running game where the player plays an Earth spirit that moves between six lanes in a an infinite tunnel to collect souls and dodge obstacles, ultimately saving the Earth’s soul from corruption.

Summary Overview – The game is arcade in the sense that it is simple in player interaction and linear where the player’s ultimate goal is to reach the final level and defeat it. The player controls Voodude the Earth Spirit (or one of the other unlockable characters) as he harvests the souls from natural resources before humanity can consume them. The player is trying to collect as many as they can, gradually getting closer to the Earth’s core where they can unite the souls and start a new Earth of purity. The player will have to dodge around six-lane tunnels that are abstractions of human resource consumption as souls head towards the centre and obstacles are flying around in various patterns.

Key Features

-          Four simple and responsive controls (move clockwise, anti-clockwise, vertically and jump)

-          Slick animation and aesthetic

-          Intense obstacles sequences and boss battles

-          Unlockable characters

-          Level specific power-ups

Gameplay

-          First Minute: The player sees a menu screen with the option to start a new game or review the scores from past games played. Selecting the “new game” option prompts him to select a character to player. At this point in time only one is available but the silhouettes of other characters and the conditions required to unlock them are visible. After he selects the character known as “Voodude” the screen fades to black and text fades onscreen, reading; “Wake my child. Your time has come to fulfil your purpose. In your home a hungry shadow threatens to consume your very essence. You must save the souls of your flock before they are subject to a fiery fate…” The screen then fades to the first level where the player can see the character they selected running away from a furnace on one of six conveyor belts. Small green souls begin to fall down into the furnace, refuelling it and straw buzz saws and sparks begin to fly up and down the lanes. The player is able to shift between the lanes to collect the souls, simultaneously dodging the obstacles and the chaos of the first level begins…

-          Gameflow: (see diagram)

-          Victory Conditions: The player must collect enough souls so that the fuel bar for that level depletes entirely. This will defeat the level and allow progression to the next stage. There will be several levels which the player has to complete to get to the final stage which defeating completes the game overall. Quality of play is judged by how many retries the player had to make, how quickly each level was completed, and how few souls were lost to the furnace.

-          Aesthetics: The levels will be abstracted versions of human resource consumption set in a spiritual world which the player inhabits.

-          Sound: Each level could have a different soundtrack or each character could bring a soundtrack with them. Boss battles would have their own soundtrack.

-          Controls: Left moves the character to the next lane in a clockwise fashion, Right in an anti-clockwise fashion. Up moves the player to the lane directly across the tunnel to them. Spacebar makes the player jump in the air off the lane they are currently standing on (used as a dodge).

-          Level Design: Each level will have six lanes the player can run on. There will also be some kind of fuel gauge that indicates how much longer the level will take. This refuels slightly for every soul the player misses but otherwise gradually decreases over time. Each level will carry with it a theme for both narrative and gameplay purposes. The obstacles and power-ups will follow this theme. (More on level specifics as they are developed)

-          Bosses: Each level could finish with a boss stage that relates to the theme of the level. The way the player defeats them is by understanding the boss’s attack patterns and dodging appropriately then picking up a power-up that can strike the boss back, reducing its fuel gauge, which is essentially its health. Following the arcade ‘rule of threes’ this will need to be accomplished three times consecutively to defeat the boss entirely. (More on boss specifics as they are developed)

Plot – The player is an Earth Spirit that has been awoken by Mother Earth to harvest the souls of purity from different parts of the world and bring them to the heart of the Earth where they can be united and the world can be reborn. The player starts with their own forest, extracting souls from the plant-life there, then moves on to the oceans in an oil refinery, then a power station, then the skies in a polluting engine. Finally the player flees to the Earth’s core as the world disintegrates around them. Upon succeeding the souls are able to unite in the heart of the Earth and start over once the world has been purged from corruption.

Characters – The players play as Voodude the Earth Spirit but other forms of Earth spirits are available based on progress made by the player. These will essentially be skins opposed to having separate storylines/abilities. (More on characters as they are developed)