Gang Run was a casual indie project started within a group of friends in which I was the game designer. It is a side-scroll endless runner with a fully armed character as the avatar, and includes a background story while keeping everything integrated and engaging. The story is about a group of gangsters who attack the city, killing innocent people and kidnapping children. The avatar of the game is one of those children who want to avenge the murder of his/her parents. Therefore, the gangsters are the enemies whom the player has to fight.
One of our biggest challenges was to determine an appropriate art-style for the game, and in that matter, some of the unique features we had envisioned for the game made this issue even more challenging. Although the game was a casual runner, we wanted to create a sense of progress for the player by including features like character development (both visually and gameplay-wise) and periodic change in environment (by having different cities as different levels/stages of the game).
As for character development, I determined that the characters of the game (both playable characters and enemies) would start as children and then grow in age gradually. I designed a few playable characters, each one with two different body sizes and for each size, two visual appearances (four different visual appearances and therefore, four different ages in total), and a unique gameplay ability (such as throwing a grenade, going invisible, etc.) that differentiated them even more from other avatars.
We chose the mafia/gangster style as the general theme for the characters of the game, with a simplified art-style like this:
We spent much time finding the right art-style that would support the visual features we wanted, such as character growth (in age and size), and in the end, we decided to go with something similar to the "chibi" character style. Here, you can see some of the early concepts for the characters of the game:
Except for the character development, another unique point of the gameplay is the fact that the player's character is running in the middle of the screen while carrying two weapons in their two hands, and the player's mission is to shoot enemies both behind and in front of the running character! So I designed the control scheme of the game like this:
I designed many different power-ups that could be collected during gameplay. Some of them were associated with features outside of the gameplay (such as shop features and player's scores), while others were to put into a "?" box with a focus on making the combat of the gameplay more intense, adding the element of randomness and luck to it. In that case, the player has to shoot the boxes that spawn randomly into the game levels, to obtain their powers.
I also did much R&D for designing the economy system and monetization of the game. I defined one soft currency and one hard currency that both were, directly and indirectly, purchasable by real money. The player can gather some soft currency while playing the game and use it in the shop for upgrading various gameplay features, while the hard currency which is used for cosmetic features and time-skipping can only be purchased by real money.
Here you can watch, download and play a very early prototype of Gang Run:
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