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.