Depot Gato (Game Design Document)

◴ 5 February 2024 | ☕ 5 mins

Introduction

Game Summary Pitch

Depot Gato is simple 2D tower defense style game where you shoot balloons down which are abducting your cat friends.

Inspirations

Balloon Popping From Samsung CRT TV: Random balloon popping game from Samsung CRT TV. It was really bare bone had nothing other than moving circles and popping them. But the core concept is extremely simple and easy to make.
Plant vs Zombies: It’s tower defense game but giving the tower a personality is what brings the charm into the mechanics. Also the Spawning Lanes and Lawn mowers as lives are interesting mechanics.
Breath of the wild: Just using colors on same enemies to show different strength and different abilities.

Player Experience

A simple game with static background where with mouse you can point your cannon up and down. Different colored balloons let player know their speed in this case. There is cool down on cannon so player must fast but precise to shoot those balloons down. It’s simple mechanics to start with but judges you based on your reaction time and accuracy.

Platform

Game should be able to run Web.

Development Stack

Godot: Game Engine
Pixelorama: For Pixel art and Sprite sheet animations
Git: To do version control

Genre

Single Player, Casual

Target Audience

Me, and anyone who just willing to waste some time playing as silly orange cat popping some balloons.

Concept

Gameplay overview

The player is a cat floating in balloon with a cannon pointing in direction of player mouse position in the window. On right side of screen from fixed 4 lanes balloons will spawn. Balloons are color coded to represent their difficulty. The player has to point toward the balloons and shoot them down which challenges the player’s reaction time.

Theme Interpretation (Just silly cats)

It does not have to be anything deep. All these gatos are very silly and it’s just that.

Game Mechanics

Example	Mechanic
	Cannon Cannon that points towards the user's mouse, when clicked, shoots and has a cool-down time.
	Spawn Lanes Balloons only spawn at set positions called lanes; in the beginning, only 1 lane is open, but as levels progress, more lanes are opened up to 4.
	Enemy Balloons, as enemies, move up with set speed. Their speed is represented by colors.
	Lives Rather than having fixed lives, every lane has a live represented by a spike, which means if the player loses a spike on that lane, they will lose the game if the balloon escapes the same lane, but not if it escapes in another lane that has a spike.

Art

Theme Interpretation

Using bright and vibrant colors to represent casual, fun and silly nature of the game. All the colors used also represent the my total lack of understanding of art. Like a child drawing but with bit more structure and effort.

Design

Pixel Art is go to choice as it’s simple to make and maintain. As I’m the only person working on this it’s crucial to keep it easy but not minimalistic. Also don’t want to download any assets for art and make everything from scratch to keep them consistent.

Audio

Unlike art where I can at least draw little bit, I don’t have enough time to even start with music and sound design. Also learning everything at once might affect the finishing motivation of the game. For now all the sound assets will be downloaded from the internet.

UI

In the same spirit buttons and other UI elements will be also follow bright and vibrant colors. Font would also be pixelated but bold to emphasize the casual nature of the game.