Brainstorming

While talking with friends and receiving their feedback I decided to brainstorm on top of that -

• Different types of pins based on an animals;

• To make the game more interesting the player will have the freedom to choose between areas on a menu (map) and each area is represented by an animal, so if the player is tired to deal with "monkey-pins" he can go back to the menu and keep playing with a different animal that offers another environment and behaves.
• Environment is where that animal lives: how the background image and the track looks like. For "monkey-pins" will probably be a forest making an analogy with their natural habitat, for fishes maybe a track that remember a lake or underwater.
• Behaves - Each pin has it unique characteristic imitating the animal that it represents, for example: the "monkey-pin" may jump from left to right and they will only stop when you hit them, for fishes they can "swim" so when the ball tries to cross a river or lake it is slowed by the water making it more difficult to hit the "fish-pin".

• This map/world will be represented by an island for easy navigation of the player.

• Each area of this map has their own tracks, beginning with easier tracks but becoming more challenging as you accomplish them.

• After you complete a track you will receive an amount of stars:
• Fail: 0 star;
• Finished but with a bad timing (took too long): 1 star;
• Finished in an acceptable timing: 2 stars;
• Good timing: 3 stars.

• The player can go back an try it again until he gets all stars.

• During the track course you may find some heart shaped items, they will work as a second chance to the player, so if he fails (falls from the track) he will have the option to choose between trying again and do not waste one of his hearts or try again from the place where he lost.

• Global score showing how many stars the player collected so far.

• Background music changes for each area.

• Two special areas on the map besides the regular areas (with the "animal-pin"): 
• Tutorial: this is where new player can receive their training and learn how the game work. With very easy tracks and a lot of explanations the player will receive training before going out and play the "real" game tracks.
• Challenges: face more complex tracks with different types of "animal-pins", environment variations, traps, etc.

• Set up different types of input (the standard W,A,S,D did not work very well for everybody).

Now is time to start working on top of these ideas. What is coming as next step will be the development of the Tutorial area and the "Monkey-pin" area. After that I will probably work on the menus and interfaces, make it look nicer, seek for nice background tracks, better sound effects and work on physics and balance of the game.

Starting with a prototype

At first my only intention was to understand better how the tool that I am using works and to learn more about Game Design. As my professor said, Blender is very addictive I really have to agree with that! Maybe it is not the most powerful software available at the market now but I think it is an amazing entry-level software for people who wants to learn more about 3D modeling, game development and animations, it's free and open-source which already makes it great! You are more than welcome to explore http://www.blender.org/.

Back to what matters - I really wanted to model something funny and at the same time start working with the logic tool, play with the physics engine and test what I could do using only the point-and-click side of Blender (yes, so far no python scripts, shame on me). I came up with the idea of a bowling game, that would be simple: a ball, hit the pins and that's it. But what about the funny side? First I thought that would be cool using the monkey-face that it is native on Blender so I modeled a Monkey-face-pin: 

Monkey-face pin

Ok, it looks very stupid, I know...but it was a prototype so, let's move on! What more would make the game more interesting and not only just another ordinary bowling game? Why not add ramps and link them by a few flat boards instead of only a flat board? Could be nice! Also change the goal of the game, instead of hit the pins to knock all of them you must: hit the pins and make them fall off the board! So you can control the ball using the keyboard and with that you have to hit the pins and keep hitting it until it falls to the infinity background.

Basics concepts of the game

With that I already started working on the logic, physics and all I could come up with such as background music, sound effects for the collisions. I also wanted to add a score that counts how many hits (collisions) between the ball and the pins already happened. With that I created another rule for my game: the less hits, the better.

First version

What is working for now:

• If the ball falls off from the board, the game restart;
• If a pin falls off there is an inside counter that keeps tracking the amount of pins that already fell, if all 9 fall off the board the game freezes for a second and restart.
• For each hit (collision) the score increases by one.
• You can play using W,A,S,D.
• There are sounds: background music, when the ball is rolling and when the ball hits a pin.
• The Monkey-face pins rotates before getting hit by the ball!

With that done I sent the prototype to a couple of friends, skilled gamers (yeah, hardcore players) and unskilled ones (sorry to say the truth that you are unskilled). The results were pretty nice and I got a few feedbacks:

• All of them told me that they enjoyed the game, maybe they were just being polite but they do tried a couple of times to see if they could finish it with less hits.
• Those who are already used to games could finish it.
• Some of them asked to change the size of the ball, the force applied to the ball when pressing the keyboard to control it(too sensitive) and it felt as if the ball was not effective when colliding with the pin, it would not go away easily.

I decided to change a couple of things based on the feedbacks: make the ball bigger, the pins lighter, apply less force on the ball and this is the result:

Rendered image from the game

Game play of the game -