Aperture Attack

interNational Geographic wants you to be their next world-renowned photographer. As your first step, they have sent you to their training facility to evaluate your skills by giving you shots of objects that you need to find and take good photos of as fast as possible. Hurry up, the clock’s already ticking!

Unique Selling Proposition

Not often can you find a game where basic camera settings are highlighted. This game does just that. Plus there are few photography games on the market, and the style of the game has much appeal.

Summary

As the game begins, the player is informed that he is being recruited by “The interNational Geographic Society” as a field photographer. However, every new recruit is put through a series of tests. These tests are administered as photography challenges in on of their specially prepared warehouses. Once in the warehouse, the player will have a fixed amount of time to find and shoot as many of the warehouse’s items-of-interest and return to the starting point.

To accomplish this goal, they player is given their choice of camera, a picture of the items that are to have their pictures taken, and are then released into the warehouse.players must then move rapidly, taking as many shots of as many of the items as possible. Each location has a different amount of light, so the player mush balance his ISO, shutter speed, and aperture to compensate and not have too narrow a depth-of-field or too blurry a shot. Each shot drains the battery on the camera, and fills the chip, so scattered throughout the level are battery cells and memory chips the player can pick up to replenish.

Once they feel they’ve taken as much as they need, the player then finds his way back to the starting desk so the tester can review the shots and score the player appropriately. With a high enough score, the player is then allowed to move on to the next level.

Retrospective

This game was prototyped in a single week using the 3D tools inside the Game Maker engine. The gameplay was proven to be viable, and most importantly, fun - even though the limits prescribed by the engine, such as a lack of dynamic lighting, really cut into the visual impact of the game.

Due to the 1 week of combined design and development time, which in reality was less due to needing to work and do other school projects, the protype has several bugs, and is keyboard-action only.