Biker's Paradise Game Design Document

Biker’s Paradise : Game Design Document

Intro

In Biker’s Paradise, you are a biker cycling through a skate park. Disaster strikes when you crash due to a snowstorm, and you lose your bike. Your goal is to find and repair your bike in order to have your old life full of fun riding back.

Key Features

-Two dimensional

-Dichotomy of bicycle-riding and walking

-World in which society is built on bicycles

-A narrative that elicits emotion from the player

-Empathy, loss and appreciation

Genre

-platformer

-side-scroller

-alternate reality

-ragdoll physics-based

-bmx

-narrative based

Platforms

-web browser (itch.io, kongregate and other websites)

-port to Mac, Windows and Linux optional

Story/Narrative

You begin the game as a biker in a skate park and have fun doing various tricks. Disaster strikes when a snowstorm hits, and you crash due to the high winds and nasty weather, breaking and losing your bike. Your search for your lost bike takes you to the scrapyard, and you pick up various parts to try and scavenge what you can to fix your bike. You eventually find what you need and fix your bike up to be good as new, if not better. You spend the rest of your days biking, having fun in your favorite skate park.

Characters and World

The protagonist is a young man whose primary form of travel is bicycle. He lives in a society who values bicycles as integral to life. Life is nothing if you don’t have a bike to ride. People grow up with their bicycles and form a steady bond with them. You have no special skill - the only skill you need to have in this world is knowledge of how to ride a bike. If you can’t do that, society frowns upon you as a person. There are no enemies in this game - there is only the environment. If you don’t own a bike, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get anywhere in the world and in life itself.

Level Design

Level one is a skate park. You can spend as long as you want here having fun, without progressing any farther in life or in the story. Level two is where it picks up. You take some risks and run into a snow storm. You lose your bike in the middle of the level and have to walk into level three. Level three leads you down farther and farther into the junkyard in the middle of a snowstorm. Your primary goal in this level is to find the lost pieces to your bike. Level four brings you back up, out of the junk and out of the snow. You find your bike and fix it up to be new again. Level five is another playground level, in which you can spend as much time as you want.

Gameplay

The goal is to find the pieces to your broken bicycle and have fun in the skatepark. The win condition is completing all five levels. The only losing condition is if you fall off of the world - but even then, there’s no penalty, you just re spawn at the beginning of the level with no defects. For the first part and for the last part of the game, the player can ride their bike over ramps, jumps, and loop de loops. During the middle part of the game, the player must traverse this skate park environment by walking and crouching . All of the previous environmental objects the biking player had been previously having fun on become obstacles for the walking player. There is no explicit score.

Art

The art is in a cartoony style with thick black outlines around objects and linear shadows. Inspiration is taken greatly from Scribblenauts. The color palette is bright and playful. One notable thing, however, is the lack of the color red throughout levels two through four. Since your bicycle is red, I want to highlight your loss by removing this color entirely from the game while you don’t have it.

Sound and Music

A constant noise of bike pedals whirring. During the snowstorm, high pitch wind sounds. A raspy rock guitar riff sets the stage at the beginning of each level in which you have your bike, and a softer acoustic guitar riff of the same chord sets the stage for the levels in which you don’t have a bike to highlight this dichotomy even more. Other sounds - bike crashing when you crash your bike.

UI and Controls

Controls are optimized for keyboard use since it is targeted toward web browsers. Gamepads are usable, but since I only have an Xbox controller, there’s no guarantee that it’ll work for other types of controllers. There is no HUD while the player is playing - instructions pop up as you need them in game (for instance, when you need to crouch to get past a certain part, a “Shift” key or Y button image pops up, then disappears)

Accessibility

This game does not address any issues regarding vision or audio. Those who are deaf or colorblind can play with minimal interference as neither audio nor color are integral parts of the experience. Blind people, however, I have no solution for.

Market Analysis

Target market: casual gamers, those who browse flash games in their free time Precedents: Happy Wheels, BMX Master Comparisons: Happy Wheels has different characters to choose from, Biker’s Paradise only has one Happy Wheels has gore, Biker’s Paradise is more wholesome and family-friendly BMX Master is competitive while Biker’s Paradise is casual