Week 1 - Ideattion

Senior Team* Week One (8/31-9/6)

This last week I spent more concentrated time on my couple of ideas than I ever had previously and I think I came away with a better system for planning out projects than I had previously used. I started by spending an hour just spewing out ideas on my own, at the end I was left with about ten nuggets. over the next couple of days, whenever I had an hour or two free I would spend worrying away at one or another of the nuggets, thinking about what made it interesting and unique. On 9/4 my senior team had a meeting to decide on which ideas we liked and would present to the class on 9/7, of my nuggets, two were chosen and I picked my favorite of the remaining eight to be my third idea. I took these three nuggets and delved into them, by 9/7 I had grown each of them into a solid game idea.

This process took a lot of the pressure out of coming up with the ideas. Instead of each idea having to stand on it's own right out of the gate, I could churn out several stories looking for mechanics or mechanics looking for stories. By allowing the two parts to be separate I was able to develop the nuggets first and discover the parts I liked and disliked about each nugget. By the time of the team meeting I'd already dismissed three of the ten nuggets because of flaws that overshadowed their strengths.

Once the nuggets started growing I had a better idea of where each was headed, such as one of the nuggets the team ended up settling on, The Escaped Finnish Slave**. The initial nugget was based on the Farcry series and an article I found online about the Baltic slave trade in the Middle Ages. As I nurtured the nugget it became clear to me that the game didn't want to be the murder-fest that Farcry games tend to be, but rather it wanted to be a game about survival against the odds where living from day to day meant avoiding fights rather than picking them.

*Senior Team is the first semester of a year long graduation game project
** You play as a Finnish slave who has escaped his captures and is fleeing home, also not the final title of the game