The work I did on the design document

This week our team completed our full academic pitch. Following on from the lit survey of last week, this week we added our design document.

We believe that the best game genre to complete our tests in is a first-person shooter. The reason for this is that we believe there are more statistics to analyse; for example, how many shots a player fires, or how many different weapons the player uses. Also, the game is more flexible in that you can give the player a motive and bend the narrative to suit our own will easier.

We are currently looking at using either Unreal Tournament 2004 or Half-Life 2 to create our map and subsequently test people. The reason we feel one of these programmes will be best is that, as a team, we have the most experience with these two and so feel we could create our best work within their editors.The players' matches will take the format of one-on-one games, with a time limit of ten minutes per match. We have elected to have one-on-one matches because it erases the elements of team play. We believe that the possibility of teammates interacting with each other could skew the results, whereas we can have more accurate data with a purely one-on-one match-up. As well, we have decided on our ten-minute time limit because it will give the player time to get to grips with all of the prominent details and features of the map.

The test subjects will be playing their matches against us. We will thoroughly test ourselves on the maps against each other in order to rank us in order of competence. The reason we are not using bots to play against the test subjects is that we feel there is too large a chance that the bots may not run properly all the time, and if their AI breaks then it will ruin the test. We will perform according to our pre-set script, depending on the difficulty which we are telling the player that they are competing against.