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.