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.

Week 5

This week has been about brainstorming new ideas for games because we dont want to stick to just one game idea so early in the game. The team was brain storming some more on the idea of the shapeshifting objects but nothing relevant has been decided.
Justin also had ideas to make a relaxation game we look at examples such as Flower a game where the player controls the petals of flowers as they fly through the wind and leads them from flower to flower.
Pretty sweet idea and very unique but alas we could not come out with a solid design or idea to go forth with such an idea.

So far this week i have been doing research for possible weapons for the MOBA game as well as the turn based strategy game which has come back into the picture as another possible game idea.

Back to the MOBA game in a moment of revelation while researching i came across the idea that the game should be set in space, that would take the weight of some animations such as walking; it would allow us to not spend a huge amount of time on the environment as well, we could have an asteroid field as the battle zone and ships as ammo and energy depots as well as some barrels and crates spread around to populate the map, this would also add another level of interactivity to the game as players could attack from above and below. I have not discussed this idea with the team yet but i am hoping them as well as the class will give me some useful pointers to nail this art style down.

Week 4

Another week goes by as we move along the semester. It is now week 4 and we have seen some radical changes to our game idea. The first of which and probably most important of all is Dragon Song. 

I spent a good chunk of time this week researching art styles that would be successful. In class we had discussed how it would be better if the game was 2D instead of 3D because it would be more in scope. So i started doing some research. I came up with a couple of ideas such as a 2D platformer in which the heroine needs to explore the environment by jumping around from spot to spot.

Another art style and probably my favorite was to set the heroine in a dark world Limbo style, color code pieces of the environment that could be used as interactive objects to make music and make the heroine white as she represents hope. Once she started unlocking different parts of the song, color would start coming back to her world  to represent happiness but the color would be washed out and kinda faded because her world would never be the same after dragons ravaged her village.

Sadly after talking it out and assessing the risks we decided that it not viable for the team to go on with this idea since the gameplay is so focused around sounds. Sound presents a problem because there are very few if any sound engineers at champlain and while members of our team are taking sound design classes they are not experienced enough to make the best out of their abilities to make a game in which we need not only music but good quality and engaging sounds. 

The verdict, Dragon Song has ben scrapped form our idea books and we have moved on to new ideas and improving old ones. 

There was talk about a shapeshifting game in which the player would have a certain shape and would use different shape shifts to put it through a hole. Personally i don't know how i feel about this game, i feel like i wouldn't be challenged as an artist as much as our other game ideas. which leads me to my next point.

This week i concentrated more on research than sketches. I really like shows such as Gundam Seed, 00, etc. My favorite childhood mech show has always been Neon Genesis Evangelion, but there are many more such as the red baron and more contemporary ones such as Gurren Lagann. The stories as well as the animations were a huge draw for me but more than anything i like the characters and the robot designs. 

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfxjdfGo4p5GmEmNLitXoWd8e9BMhk4hvtdmCm90PPHbKkkx3PnDfB4_AjdBmB50aw1iKAqSZG5i7-kNBwRPcVRrJzy5F0xvGThysVZvZk3MfN5OFKvMw3KW-JAay3kBUX_ce7Grml3c0d/s1600/gundam00+robots.jpg

http://wiki.evageeks.org/images/a/a4/Eva2-0_evas01-00-02-03.jpg

So for the MOBA Mech ( Wow we really need a name for this thing...) game i am drawing inspiration from these shows. This week i researched different locales in which the game could take place i looked at some of the most futuristic cities in the world right now such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Dubai. As well as some other cities that i believe could work for the setting such as Buenos Aires, Argentina; Bogota, Colombia; Medellin, Colombia; and Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. When i was thinking about cities i thought to myself who has ever used Bogota, Medellin, or Buenos Aires as game settings? these are all cities with amazing architectural designs, skyscrapers and a booming population what better location to have an all out robot war? 

That was it for my research this week more to come on the MOBA Mech (like a name hopefully) and other ideas next week. 

Week 3

This week we discussed some details about the MOBA mech game. We presented to the class a simple interface of how the mech could be customized and how each different part would affect the gameplay. This was well received but the question remained of how it was going to play? to this end Ryan made a paper prototype which involved rolling dice at the beginning of each turn to see who would go first.  This person would then move their "mech" which was customized in the areas of health, ballistic and energy resistance, mobility, and tonnage with the latter determining how many weapons each mech could equip (up to a total of 4) depending on the weight assigned to it. Each player would then get a turn and the objective was to get 5 kills. The game was very successful in my opinion although it does need some refining it was most definitely an enjoyable experience and i cant wait to go forth an make it into an actual virtual game.

We also discussed the issue of dragon song being a open world sandbox style game and it was decided that it would be a 2d game. Now how we are going to represent this 2d style remains to be seen we have some cool ideas but some research will be necessary. As for art this week i concentrated on some art for dragon song, i sketched some ideas for the main heroine as well as other iterations for the logo and some other concepts, in the end i presented a mood shot to the class:

I am starting to get more and more excited as to where this projects are heading as the ideas flow and we refine our concepts further.

Week 2 Work