Get Down Mr. President

Gameplay

Description: Get Down Mr. President is a game where you play as an entire group of secret service agents tasked with protecting one incompetent but very targeted president. Players will control the entire group of bodyguards at once. While the president walks, threats will appear along his preset path and must be eliminated by the agents before they can cause him harm. These threats will include projectiles, explosives, and traps (such as pitfalls). The only way to nullify most of these threats will be to ‘tank’ them (ie. throwing an agent in front of a projectile), thereby sacrificing the agent, although there will be occasional non-lethal challenges such as creating a human bridge across a chasm. As players are given a preset number of agents at the beginning of each level, they will have to try to waste as few lives as possible in order to maximize their chances of safely escorting the president to his destination. 

Objective: Escort the president along his preset path until he reaches his destination, eliminating threats along the way. The game is lost if the president is harmed in any way.

Genre: Action, Arcade

Number of players: 1 (singleplayer)

Mechanics: Players will use WASD or the left stick (if on a controller) to move a center point towards which all the bodyguard entities will gravitate. Because of this, we expect that movement will be clumsy and imprecise. Therefore, when scaling up the difficulty in later levels, the mechanics players will have to improve on are their timing and reflexes. We plan on using a combination of distant and close threats to force players to constantly move their agents around in order to complete the objective. We also plan for the players to have more nuanced controls mapped to the ABXY buttons and right stick (or the mouse, if playing on a computer) that would allow the agents to disperse temporarily in order to deal with larger area threats, or to eliminate specific threats at higher levels (ex. Press B to throw an agent into a pitfall so that the president can walk over him).

Experience: Given the exaggerated nature of this game’s concept, coupled with the fact that this is a student project, we don’t want this to be a serious experience for the player. If we had to use one term to describe the atmosphere of the game, it would be ‘black comedy’. Normally lethal obstacles, like explosives or lasers, should not surprise the player, and losing agents should feel like a normal step of progressing the game. To support this theme, we plan on having borderline caricatures for our character assets, and a relatively lighthearted sound design. As players get a sense of the mechanics of the game, we will increase their immersion by adding more and more time-sensitive threats for them to deal with, building a sense of chaos and fast paced gameplay.