22/10/12 (and reading week) - Ideas, Dubstep Dragons research, rip-o-matic and GDD

During our next session everyone presented their ideas for a game idea that they thought would fit with the theme identified by our client. Many good ideas were thrown about but were eventually narrowed down to just 3 that would then be pitched to a panel as a real game designer must do to obtain funding or a contract for the creation of said game.

These three idea's were (in the words of their creators):

Straitjacket Racers (Kris Kosunen):
"Race management sim, think f1 manager. Staff at a mental institution make high risk patients participate in races around the courtyard. You play as staff members, each have a stable of racers and can boost them with certain meds or threats etc."

White Van Man (Rachel Woods):
"Open world driving game. Drive around city and meet other white van men at traffic lights and challenge them to races to earn money. avoid the police, keep an eye on your hunger, petrol, nicotine, and ego levels, do dodgy odd jobs. Goal is to win as many races, make as much money as possible, and stroke your ego for ultimate street cred."

Dubstep Dragons (Tim Nguyen):
"- Bird's eye view
- Geometry War styled combat effect
- Crazy art style- Dubstep soundtrack with oriental influence"

The team then split into three groups to work on a Rip-o-Matic, which is a compilation of various sounds, images and videos that give a general idea of what your game will be like and what it will be about (a mock up trailer designed to get your idea across and get potential investors interested.) As well as a basic game design document for their groups idea.

I was in a group with Dean Stone, Tim and Wayne. And we were working on Dubstep Dragons. Below you can see the notes we made on the game:

Dubstep Dragon  –WORKING TITLE –

Wayne – Art Director
Dean – Audio, Monetisation, Proof of Concept
Matt – Gameplay, Mechanics
Tim – Rip-o-matic, audio

For Mobiles Devices

Gameplay Influences

-          Geometry Wars

-          Super Laser Racer

-          Dubstep

-          Wipeout (Imagine viewing it in Bird’s eye view)

Visual Influence

-          Tron

-          Audiosurf

-          Geometry Wars

-          Dubstep

Game Synopsis

Playing as a magical Oriental Dubstep Dragon,

Dragon has speakers in its wings for propulsion/attacks

Different dubstep dragons based on different cultural dubstep influences as players/opponents?

Different skins & upgrades available both for in game currency and real world money

Dragons can transform to a more cybernetic/cyborg creature

Audio will affect the track, such as widening and narrowing the track.

As is mentioned in the notes above, my task for the week was to come up with gameplay ideas for the game. From these we as a group would select one to go into our design document, below you can see the ideas i came up with:

"Idea 1:

Could take "racing" slightly less literally than intended...

- Make game score based to determine position against AI opponents

Would use REAL SONGS

Playerrs would need to round up 'enemies' by evading them (think pacifism mode in Geometry Wars)

A display bar would show players when "drops" are coming, the player would have to be in proximity with as many 'enemies' as possible to score maximum points when the 'drop' hits! WOB

After this the player must rely on smaller beats and WOB's to destroy enemies

(not sure the above idea could really fit with our brief unless we made it into a racetrack with AI opponents or something)

Idea 2:

Traditional racing style (POWER UPS!!!):

Dubstep-based ATTACK power-ups:

- "Drop" - MEGA DUBSTEP SHOCKWAVE

- "Rapid-Fire" - Could offer different rates of 'rapod-fire'. think 'wobwobwobwob' but very fast

- "DUBSTEP LASER" - WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOB

BOOST power-up that increases player speed (and backing track bpm?)

INVULNERABILITY power-up that would either a) briefly make the player immune from opponents attacks OR b) provide protection from 'x' number of attacks, think shells in mario kart

Notes: i cant decide whether the player should have a health metter or simply suffer a knockback from any attacks that hit. Thoughts?

Idea 3:

Another possibility would be to combine these two ideas, however it might overcomplicate the game.

Also thought of making these ideas into separate game modes but would require extra (unnecessary) work.

Apologies for any unnecessary double letters in here, this keyboard suxx!"

Granted there are only a couple of them but i thought they were both sound and i still quite like my first idea though we did eventually go with the second. Below you can see a link to the finished rip-o-matic as well as some logo mock-us that Wayne created.

Dubstep Dragons - Rip-O-Matic 

 

Tim was the one behind our awesome rip-o-matic, i think it conveys our ideas for the game very well, though i feel it could have benefited from a reference to the geometry wars art-style of the game.

The logos Wayne created were once again top-notch, we found it really hard to decide which one we all liked the best but eventually opted for the black and white logo you see above though, in hindsight the middle logo would have been more fitting, i feel.

Finally, you can see our finished GDD by using the links below, for some reason we have two versions, one which includes my work but not deans, and another that shows deans work but not mine, so i have linked them both and labelled them appropriately:

GDD with no Monetisation section

GDD with none of my own work, see bottom page for Monetisation

And with everything done, all that was left was to wait til the next monday so we could pitch our ideas to our clients. 

15/10/12 - Remode Visit and a Huge Setback

Today we were finally introduced to the brief for the module by the person who would also be our 'client', Ella Romanos from Remode Games.

After introducing us to the basic concept behind the module and giving us a very useful powerpoint presentation on the processes employed by Remode when developing for a client, she then moved on to outline the game that she as our client wanted us to make as outlined in the brief.

She requested we make a Single Player Racing Game for Online (Internet-based) or Mobile Platform. Adding that this game must use the [adult swim] brand and finally that this game must be Free-to-Play and include in-app purchases for monetisation.

After a few questions to clarify what this request entailed and how far we could stretch each of the terms in said request, we huddled together to discuss the elephant in the room; none of the game idea's we had come up with over the last two weeks fit the brief at all.

So, with this sudden setback, right at the end of this session, we were once again given the task of thinking about some game ideas. This time however we had to come up with idea's that fit the brief.

On the lighter side of things, our group, after a long and arduous voting thread on Facebook had come to an agreement on the name for our 'studio', with credit for said name going to Rachel Woods:

The logo you see above was created by Wayne Ramsay, and i have to say i think it looks really good.

08/10/12 - More Ideas

This week was simply spent writing up and expanding on the ideas we had been thinking about over the last couple of weeks, i worked with my colleague Tim to do this.

Here you can see our notes for the session, we both had only one idea that we could really flesh out. For me i had the fairly undeveloped concept that mashed together the fighter gameplay of combos and button mashing with the openness of the 2D Sidescrolling platformer genre. As with alot of my ideas this one was pretty vague but still i thought it stood out as an interesting concept, especially as the fighting genre focusses on relatively fixed camera points with no character movement outside of fighting.

Tim's idea sounded very interesting, the idea of being able to play as a man/woman and experience their entire lifespan from birth to death in about 10-20 minutes. Again there seemed to be a bit of narrowing down to be done, not least because there were two different ways for the game to be done, however i particularly liked the idea of a Wario-ware-esque take on this concept wherein you play lots of minigames that correlate with points in your characters lifestyle with tempo and colour palette being used to portray emotion.

Below you can see our notes from this session:

Life and Emotion

o   You play as a man/woman from birth to death

o   Colour palette is affected by the emotions of the character

o   Animation would be semi-realistic

o   Artsy game

o   Condensed down to about 10 minutes

o   Art would be stylised coinciding with the emotions

§  E.g a sad point would be similar to Limbo

-          Life and Emotion (Minigame based)

o   Entire life will be based around minigames

§  E.g picking a job, exams etc.

o   Emotion with effect type of minigame and colour palette and tempo 

o   The minigames will coincided with the timeline

o   Wario ware –esque

-          2D sidescrolling adventure/story-driven game with fighting-game style combat

o   Combo-based attacks

o   Fast Paced, button mashing gameplay with large numbers of enemies

o   Platforming Fighting game

o   Animation: quick, sharp movements

o   Art-style: anything that’s AWESOOMEE

-          Fruit based mmorpg

-          Unicorn rhythm based game with rainbows

-          Game based around an Extra-terrestrial mining community

-          Educational Sci Fi

01/10/12 - Management structures

In this session we were introduced to two different management structures for our groups to consider using. Waterfall and Agile.

Agile

Here you can see a 10 minute break-down video were given to watch during the lesson, this covers an adaptation of the Agile method that adds on daily 'scrum' meetings for quick updates on progress and problems and generally to keep up communication between teams.

Agile seems like a really clever way to make any project a lot less daunting by breaking everything down into smaller components, and by creating a release backlog that project managers are certain can be achieved for an initial release, it saves a lot of wasted effort on features that can't be implemented in time. It also ensures through the sprint stages that every feature is fully tested and useable by the end of the cycle.

Waterfall

Waterfall, unlike Agile, is a very rigid design progress in which changes made in later stages of development are very undesirable, and potentially costly, so everything is planned out in advance. It see's progress as a steady transfer of work down through a series of stages, the diagram below shows some of these stages.

This method, though inflexible, allows everyone to work from pre specified plans, meaning that predictions for when the project will be completed can be made very accurately, provided said project has been thoroughly planned in advance.

In my opinion, i think that Agile would suite our group more, especially as in most cases it is our first major project, so anything that can make the next few months seem less daunting would be a boon. The flexibility that Agile allows would also be useful as we can all assume that mistakes will be made as we adapt to this new way of working.