Mood Boards

Once I was happy with the concepts I had come up with, I moved onto the 3rd stage, research. This involved looking at all the ideas I'd had and thinking about how to develop them further, into proper mechanics/objects. A great way to do this is to create a series of mood boards; a page full of images that you can use for reference when designing your mechanics/objects. For my mood boards, I choose 4 different ideas to make them around: Western High Street, Guns, props and targets/power-ups.

For the Western high street idea, I gathered images of straight western main town roads and the old wooden buildings dotted along them. I got a nice mixture of real life town streets, movie set versions and a few from games. Using a variety like this will show me what the most popular definition of 'Western High Street' is, allowing me to create the most realistic environment for my game.

Western High Street ideas

My second mood board focused on the weapons I was hoping to use in the game. Since the setting is a an old Western one, I wanted to use authentic weapons of the time. This meant fully automatic weapons are pretty much out of the question and single shot ones are what I needed to look at. To have a western dual flare to the game I wanted to have the players use revolvers because they were the staple handgun in the era. I had an idea to possibly add a rifle as a power up that allows zoom and has more ammo in it, so looked up a few designs for those as well. I got a mixture of both real life and model pictures, so I have an idea of what to aim for in the long run.

Gun ideas

With the setting and weapons researched, I wanted to get some ideas for a bit of detail to the scene so created a board of props. The 3 things I had an idea for were barrels, crates and some plants. These aren't a huge part of the game but adding them in will make the scene seem more realistic and they can also be used to hide targets behind. I got a real life image of each thing to see what they would really look like and then checked out some 3D models/game versions to see how similar the 2 were. Each were very close in appearance, most likely due to the fact that there never is much variety in the appearance of barrels and crates etc, however it's always good to double check and get references.

Prop ideas

The final board was filled with my ideas for the targets and power up icons. I chose generic red and white ringed targets because they're recognisable to people and will be easy to see in the game scene. I also wanted to add a few different things into the scene which may not be as obvious to shoot but will still give points. For this I was planning to use some props, such as the barrels, or even add other new objects such as scarecrows or lights. For the power ups I wanted a variety of things to keep the game as interesting as possible. I obtained images for:

• X2 points(doubles points for short time)
• Explosives(grenades or dynamite with AoE damage)
• Dual wielding revolvers(double the ammo/negate reload time)
• Rifle(more ammo and can zoom)

Each of these will have a chance to randomly appear in the scene and the first person to shoot it will be given that power up for a short time.

Target & power-up ideas