Full Metal Tactics

After looking over our previous ideas and iterating on the paper prototype success we decided to go forth to the class and present our idea of a new turn based strategy party game with customization options for the mechs. In the game each player gets to roll a dice and the dice dictates who goes first each player then gets to move and perform an action. The actions may include defending or attacking depending on how much range is supported by their weapons. The objectives of the games can include capture the flag, conquest, or just plain team death match up to 5 lives. Every time a player dies he has to sit out for 2 turns so players have to work together in teams in order to survive together or stay alive as 2 turns of 2 on 1 could drastically change the flow of battle. We decided that this battles would take place in a lab as these mechs are weapons being tested by the government and piloted by death row inmates which are seen as expendable.

We went ahead and challenged stage 1 with Full Metal as the game we wish to go forward with. We had a successful presentation, except we almost forgot to talk about the gameplay, the most important part of the whole thing. Luckily Amanda brought it to our attention and we were able to go into the gameplay further.

I think we had a successful presentation because we presented the information concisely and as a team, we all spoke and we were confident with our material. We had plenty of concept art and terrain ideas. From an art perspective i got some interesting criticism, it was pointed out that mech games have been done almost as much as zombie games at this point and that i would have to somehow think outside of the game world and come up with something fresh, something new that would set our game apart. People also mentioned the idea of organic, or fresh mechs. I cant think of anyone that has done anything like that so i have been doing some research and i think ive found some good directions n which to take the art, more research is still necessary but plants and organic material are fascinating and if they could somehow be incorporated into the mech theme then that would be a killer duo. I would also need to make the environment fit the same art style which would be challenging.

MOre to come as we move on to challenge stage 2 in the upcoming weeks .

Progress

A lot has changed since the last time i posted about our game.
At first the team decided that all of our ideas were not viable, the MOBA mech game wold be much too art intensive as well as programming intensive. The designers couldn't come up with a solid set of systems to implement on a tactical strategy game that involved moving troops around and making them battle one another, this game also proved challenging in the programming side. We dropped most of our game ideas and decided to go with the Shape shifting game which we called "the Cube Game".

In this game the player would play as a cube, it would be heavy on platforming and finding other cubes to attach itself to. The idea behind attaching this cubes onto the player was that they were "cube friends" that needed to be rescued from the attacking sphere onslaught.

Needless to say i wasn't pleased, we went from all of this awesome ideas to me thinking about creative ways to portray cubes in a game i wasn't really that interested in. But this is a team effort so i set my bad vibes aside and did some research:

Block Game (Name in Progress) Art

For this game I wanted to first and foremost give the cubes a personality. Since the player was going to be controlling this cube I wanted it to be relatable. For the main cube design I looked at games such as Portal which features a companion cube and other games such as edge, and icy purple head (online flash game).

But I also wanted to add a little touch of my own art style so I came up with the idea of making the cube hollow and put a brain with eyes inside it.

I thought this would be appropriate since the gameplay requires a lot of thinking as well as giving the hero cube a personality. Other “friend Cubes” would also be depicted in similar ways, a color change in the filling of the cube or a difference in size of the brain or eyes would set the apart the cubes.

For the environment I looked at games such as Guild Wars 2 in it there is a town called Rata Sum. I found this city interesting because the architecture is made up entirely out of cubes some used in very creative ways.

Consequently I also really liked the color palettes and wanted to use similar colors for the cube city setting.

I wanted to have vibrant colors for the vegetation and neon colors for the cubes themselves. Some of these colors would include, green, blue, yellow, light brown, etc. 

I wanted the setting to portray a village in inhabited by the cubes but it was also supposed to look run down and kind of dirty since they got invaded by the evil spheres.

In the end I didn't feel like this game was balanced in terms of amount of work since it presented a major challenge for both Design and programming but at the end of the day I would be texturing blocks.... I let my team know and they agreed with me in the sense that everyone should be invested in the game on equal amounts, we also agreed that programming would be too much of a risk.

The Verdict was to drop this game idea. 

Saturday was a QA day for our paper prototype of the MOBA Mech game. It was such a success in fact that i thought we should look at our game ideas one more time. 

  

Guest Speakers

This week we got a visit by some very important people in the industry. The lead designer and creative director of the Deus Ex Human Revolution team came from Eidos Montreal and talked to us about what they went through throughout the pre production, production, and eventual shipping of the AAA title.

One thing that stuck with me was how they came with the systems and ideas for the game story line. I really enjoyed their description of how they wrote all of their ideas with sticky notes and and the bigger ideas on bigger paper on the walls until eventually the room told the story of Deus Ex. This is a much different approach than what we are experiencing in our senior team projects in which we use the agile system. In comparison the Deus Ex team approach was much more organic with the downside being that it took more time. The development process in the industry takes a lot of time as they have to think about every facet, every action that the player might or might not take. The speakers reinforced my notion that making a video game is not only hard but also a monumental undertaking which is why the industry is so competitive and why companies hire only the most talented people.

One of the things i was to hear about was how long the project was in the conceptual phase, nothing can really get done until the story, characters, and game mechanics are all fleshed out which took the Deus Ex team quite a while to achieve.

I really enjoyed the speakers' presentation i could tell they had rehearsed it before hand which i am not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing but i thought it was very successful. I think that the main things that i gathered from the presentation were the importance of pre production and how much that shapes a game, this applies to our capstone project because we are exploring many different ideas and we are taking our time to weigh each one and come out with the most viable and fun in the short time we have to develop it.