Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Even if you base your game on another idea, you should change it up enough so that it is all your
own. Change the rules; add layers, levels, difficulties, and challenges of your own design. We
suppose you could have a career making games in which you simply copy the game ideas,
verbatim, from other developers, but it sure wouldn't be a very interesting one.
Still, you should be aware of the possible legal details involved with your games. If you are
concerned about your idea, the tools and databases we have mentioned in this section should get
you started on your research about the legal standing of your game idea, name, and so on.
What will this cost? Well, if you live in the United States, and you want to copyright a single work
with the United States Copyright Office, the basic price in 2010 is roughly $50. Through the
United States Patent and Trademark Office, the starting price of processing a trademark is about
$400, and the basic fee to file a patent is about $350. However patents are very tricky to file, and
with the necessary legal help, it will probably cost in the neighborhood of $2500-$15,000 when all
is said and done. And one more time, to be safe in these legal matters, you might want to consult
a lawyer.
Designing the Dice Battle game
For Dice Battle, which is shown in Figure 9-1, we will use ideas from poker dice, drop-style
games like Bejeweled and our own game Color Drop, but we will make a game that is fully our
own design. In the previous chapter, we discussed the history of casual games, but we left it at
match-three style games like Bejeweled. That game became so popular that further genres have
been iterated beyond it, using its basic play style. One of those genres is the battle puzzle.
Games like Book Worm Adventures and Puzzle Quest have taken the idea of the drop-style
puzzle game, but put it into the context of a larger quest. The game we will create, Dice Battle, is
an iteration on Color Drop that adds features that take it a few steps closer to being one of these
battle puzzle games.
Actually, to be honest, we have not checked every one of the thousands of games on the Internet
to see if there is not one just like this. However, the intention here is to make our game built on
some foundational ideas, but add our own flair. Here's the basic game design, which is shown in
Figure 9-1:
Game name
: Dice Battle
Game genre
: Drop-style battle puzzle game
Game description
: Battle through a succession of enemies by taking turns playing a
game on a grid of dice.
Player's goal
: To click a die that connects to the most like-numbered, like-colored dice
as possible. Points are scored for a play, and those points equal the number of hit points
removed from the enemy.
Enemies' description
: The enemies are a succession of creatures that can play the
dice game better and better.
Enemies' goal
: The enemies seek to make the best move that will remove hit points the
player. The ultimate goal of the enemies is to remove all the player's hit points.
Level end
: When the enemies have lost all their hit points
Game over conditions
: When the player has lost all hit points
