Week 4

Week 4 - 16/10/12

The first thing that I did when I arrived at class today was to look at the tasks for this week. The task was to have an informal discussion with our lecturer over our game idea.

We waited half an hour for Andrea to appear but she didn't so we just decided to go ahead with the meeting without her as to get it out of the way.

Jim seemed to like our idea, he said he could imagine it being a game, and stressed the importance of showing how you are going to make money from the game. We have decided to look at the Angry Birds money making model, and possibly use something similar, as our game is a little like it.

Also, James asked if it was ok to take notes into the presentation, as we are planning on doing ours on Open Wonderland we are allowed to use whatever we would like, but were recommended to use small post it notes with bullet points rather than whole pages, and also to practise a lot before hand so that our pitch is smooth.

I asked Jim if we could do the open wonderland talk from Uni, or home, and he said both but I think I would choose to do it from Uni just so that there are no interruptions from children!

Week 3

Week 3 - 09/10/12

I began the week with looking at moodle, to see the tasks that were listed. After this I read the material around creating characters, we decided that this is what we would do today.

We had a group meeting which lasted around an hour where we discussed our ideas for character development, gameplay and levels. The first thing that we talked about was our actual gameplay, it would be hard to do any character development when we were unsure about how our game plays.

Briefly discussed was the target audience, this is to be casual mobile gamers, of either gender, as a result of this we decided to have the main characters and other involved as gender ambiguous. The basis of the game is maze based, and you are not able to see the maze until you get near, as the main character is a ball of light called Baboo, it is small, round with a nice smiley face and light particle physics trailing from behind. The game begins with a small introduction video featuring a little bit of the backstory and giving an idea what the main idea for the game is. Your aim is to make your way through the levels, in time, without your light going out. There is just enough time to make it through each level, but on the way you can pick up your siblings. These will recharge your light, and if you collect all of them throughout the level you will get a bonus which will let you blast enemies.

The enemies are blobs of darkness which randomly spawn throughout the level, when you are in far away range to one all you will see is blinking eyes, however when you get into the range of them they will automatically begin to hone in on you, and they are able to travel through the walls of the maze. The only attack you have against them is an AOE attack, which uses your light. This will blast the enemies away, but use some of your light giving you less time to reach the end of the maze. This is the main reason for recharging from siblings, however you will also get some random invisible pickups if you collect all siblings, these will be fairly few and far between and very powerful. These are also light based, the UV pickup and Infrared pick up. UV pickup will show you the path to the end for 10 seconds, allows you to go through enemies, this has a purple light. Infrared will make enemies glow, so you know where to expect them.

Another pickup for collecting all siblings is the flash pick up, in this, the queen song "flash" bass line plays, the level lights up for 3-4 seconds, and you get a speed boost, which kills enemies.

Some ideas for the story behind the game, which is yet unnamed are that Baboo's mother was kidnapped by darkness, without her children she is not at full strength, so cannot escape, you are collecting her children to help her escape and defeat the darkness. This is your purpose for the game, moving throughout levels, towards the final level and mother, at the final level there is a boss fight, this requires you to throw your siblings at mother, avoiding the boss, so that she gradually gains back more light.

Some idea that were rejected was that the mother light had lost you, and you were trying to find your way back but I felt that this hinted of mother abandonment and didn't think it fitted in with the game we are trying to design. Also, there were a lot of ideas about enemies, should they move through walls? or can they only chase you like the ghosts in pacman? We decided that to make the game a little harder, they should be able to move at you in anyway they wish, but there should not be too many of them, so when you do see them they are hard to get away from, but killable if you have the right amount of light.

Week 2

Week 2 - 02/12/12

This week started with a small discussion regarding our work last week, and as a group we decided that we liked the idea of the immortal dying in creative ways. Then I took a look at the tasks and discovered that we have already had some brainstorming ideas, but would speak about this later. After looking at the tasks we decided that the first thing we would do would be to look at cloud storage options. 

Our first port of call was dropbox, which some of us have used before, I tried to download this but it wouldn't connect, I'm assuming that this was due to not having administrator rights. Secondly Andrea suggested ADrive, this was free and seemed good, but didn't have online collaboration which would have posed a problem with this group project. 

Lastly we took a look at our student skydrive and decided this was probably the most straightforward of them to use, we logged in with our student emails and James created a shared group called "Team Baron" for us to share documents on. The email address for the group is TeamBaron@groups.live.com. 

We tested this email address and so far no one has received a group email but this may be due to something other than a problem, ie, as its a group message it may take time to receive. 

After this our group had a brainstorming session in which we covered some ideas in more depth which we had discussed last week. 

Game Idea 1: 2D side scroller about a thief who can walk through walls

We discussed this idea, and although all agreed that it was a good idea in concept there were some glaring faults with the gameplay, such as if the thief can walk through walls, why would he have any problems stealing things. Would he only be able to walk through certain walls? What would the puzzles be like, and how could we make them hard enough to justify walking through walls? What if the player could only walk through walls, and not doors or windows? In the end we decided that this game would be too complex for what we were looking for. 

Game Idea 2: Game starts in Black and White, the player carries out tasks which bring colour back

Again, we all agreed that this was a nice game idea, the problem would be the story behind it. I suggested that a game of this type would suit being a fairly large RPG style game, with a story which begins with the world dark, and the main hero would be fighting to bring light and colour back, and although Ross was confident that he could come up with a story, this again would be very indepth and perhaps not suited to the time available for this project. 

Game Idea 3: An immortal being trying to find funny and inventive ways to die

When we came into the brainstorming sessions this was our leading idea, we all agreed it would be a funny concept which could make for a fun game, the only problem was we were unsure what type of game this should be, should it be a 2D platformer? Or a 3D free roaming game? Again, there would need to be a fairly large backstory to this to make the concept of being an immortal really count. 

Game Idea 4: A string of light trying to find its way back to the lightbulb in order to complete the level, while trying to avoid darkness

This is the game idea which as a group we have decided to work with, this type of game would be based on physics and light engines, which would add a dimension to gameplay which we felt none of the other games properly utilized. All of us agreed that we wanted our game to have fun gameplay, not necessarily a huge indepth story, but something fun about it that would attract other people to play it. I discussed the idea of making the light string a cute character which the player would feel sympathy with. This game could be played on mobile devices, as the graphical power required would not be outrageously high. 

Game Idea 5: Comic book style

This isn't exactly a game idea but more an idea within an idea, such as making any game that we decided to design have comic book style panes which the player could break through from one to another between levels. Although we felt that this idea could have suited the immortal game concept, we felt that it wasn't necessary for the light game, as this was a simple little game the comic book concept would be adding more complexity than necessary. 

After our brainstorming ideas I looked at some similar light games, the first one was Light Up, this involved using light bulbs which when they touched other transparent light bulbs completed the level. Although I did light the physics in the game, ie the light bulbs fell when you removed ones before it, this isn't really the type of game we are thinking about. 

Next I found Prism:Light the way, this was more like the type of game we were interested in. 

Week 1

Week 1 - 25/09/12

This week was mainly spent learning about the unit, assessment and what is expected of us in relation to passing and getting a good grade. For the first hour and a half, during the lecture we learned about the Open Wonderland program, which seems like an excellent way for team/group communication. This differs from other means such as Skype as you are able to drag documents, images and ideas into a team space, which everyone can view, and edit. These stay in this space even when you log off, so are easily accessible to all members at all stages within the unit.

After this we were presented with a lecture on the actual course requirements, and what is expected of us to pass. This involved a timeline of what will be taught, when we are expected to have paperwork in for and when our pitches are due to be delivered.

Next up we were asked to form teams of 2-4 members, name them, and let Jim know who was in, and what our teams were called. I became part of Team Baron, this consists of myself, Fiona Bruce, Andrea Hosie, Ross Griffin and James Lemmon. We also all agreed to use the Open Wonderland environment for meetings when necessary as it isn't easy for all of us to get into Uni for meetings, so this will make this process much easier.

After a break we moved to the labs were we began work on this weeks tasks. This included making a blog, all of our team members decided to make on one blogger with a unified theme so that our paperwork would all look of a similar standard. After this we had an informal discussion on what area's each member of the team would work on. In college we had a similar unit to this one called Pitch to Treatment, and also within our graded unit in HNC year there was a lot of teamwork, for this we had a Project Manager, at the time that was myself and I thoroughly enjoyed this, so quickly offered myself up to this job, the rest of the team agreed. With regards to the other tasks, Andrea is focusing on graphics, but also gameplay, Ross the story and and paperwork, and James the gameplay and graphics, but we would all like to help out each other, but we will have original defined roles.

Some other tasks for this week that were discussed was setting up a code of conduct and swapping details, looking in to how to access the Open Wonderland servers from home and University, a look at how to break down the overall problem into manageable tasks. One of the main ways in which we would do this is to research other game design documents and pitches. There are a number of these available to us on Moodle, which I have thoroughly looked at, and will be keeping my own word document with ideas. Ross was given the task of coming up with some ideas and we had a small brainstorming session.

I looked into using Open Wonderland, and watched the video guide on Moodle, also I completed the first survey related to this.

We had a brainstorming session with Ross and came up with some ideas which all of us were interested in, these were narrowed down to -  Walking through walls, colour being removed and coming back, Light Physics (bulb and light trying to get back) Comic Book style breaking through panels, and an Immortal trying to kill himself in funny and inventive ways.