Getting to Know The Team
For the first week of Senior Capstone, the team wanted to get a general sense of what we wanted to come out of the class by the end of the semester. Afterwards, the rest of the team made it clear that they wanted to create a game that would potentially be chosen to move forward into senior production. Me personally, I'm more indifferent on the subject. If our game does get chosen to move forward, that would be pretty cool, but I'm also not too concerned if our game gets cut. Either way, I see this year ending with everyone having a great game to present on their portfolios.
As for what kind of game the team was going to be making, a lot of the early decision-making came down to what our strengths and weaknesses are. Our artist, Julia, for example is more comfortable creating 2D art, so the artistic direction seems to be leaning more in a 2D direction. Our programmer, Connor, is very eager to create mechanics for the game, making the technical direction more mechanic-heavy. As for myself, I'm eager to create unique systems for our game, as well as create an interesting story and characters for the player to interact with.
One point of concern for the future is what game engine we will be developing in. Connor seems to want to develop in Unreal, but I'm a bit hesitant for a couple reasons. I'm personally more comfortable working in Unity, but I do understand that he will be doing more of the programming than I will. Regardless of what engine we use, it's a topic that we will need to discuss more once we've chosen which prototype we want to go forward with.
Creating The Concepts
At our team meeting, everyone brought together some concepts that they had thought about over the summer so we could see what everyone was thinking. After some deliberation and team brainstorming, we narrowed down our ideas to 3 concepts. One was thought of by Julia during the meeting while the other 2 were created by our producer, Travis, over the summer.
Our first concept was about playing as a carrier pigeon during World War 1 attempting to deliver messages. Over the course of the week, I turned this concept into what I call a passive bullet-hell. As the player tries to deliver their message, they will be attacked by enemy forces, and must evade a barrage of attacks. Unlike most bullet-hells, the player will be stripped of the ability to shoot, and must rely solely on their evasion skills. I think this game could be very promising with further development, but in its current state, it's very basic.
Our second concept is a platformer that follows a coin inside a vending machine, as they solve puzzles and travel to different machines that frequently use coins. The big idea in this game is that the coin has the ability to transform into different coins to overcome different obstacles and solve the present puzzles. This game got the best reaction out of the other teams in our class, and in my opinion, could be a very unique twist on a platformer once more is added to it. As of right now, I think this is currently my favorite concept.
For our final concept, the idea takes a more serious turn, and attempts to address the current Syrian Refugee Crisis. After a bit of a challenging design process, the result was a stealth-based game where the player must navigate different cities in Syria in order to find and convince their family members to leave the country with them. The player must also navigate the cities without being seen by Syrian soldiers. This is a concept that I'm a bit concerned about developing for a few reasons. This is a very serious issue that the game is address, so we need to make sure that there is no point where we make light of it. There's also the issue of how much extra work this game would require from all of us, in terms of heavier research and interviewing people. I'm not against making the game, but as of right now, the other concepts are more appealing to me.
Next Sprint
For the next sprint, we are going to be working on the digital prototypes for each of our concepts. Once we have something that is playable and polished, we can make our choice on which game we're going to continue working on for the rest of the semester.
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