Week 4 - Challenge Prep

Senior Team Week 4 (9/21-9/27)

This week was both momentous and a letdown. On the one hand we got a lot of details that had been resisting actualization for a while, and we made a lot of progress with our documentation. On the other hand it didn't feel like we made much progress with the demos. During our meetings it felt like we were on fire, outside of our meetings, tasks were easily accomplished and then it felt like I was stumped for what to do next.

For Senior Team projects, each team has to convince their teachers that they have gone far enough with their game to continue to the next stage. It is a combination of test and assignment. If we don't understand and haven't worked on our own project enough then it does not go forward. Each team has to complete all the stages over the course of the semester to be eligible to present at the end of the semester and potentially continue on to the next semester.

We had initially hoped to challenge the first stage of the semester on the 28th but we fell shy of our goal.  Early in the week we determined where each of our prototypes stood and what other materials we needed to complete to successfully challenge. For me it was writing the initial Technical Risk Analysis for the Plant game and the Finnish game. For the group in general it was prepping for the presentation. The TRAs were a good and simple exercise that helped me understand how I was seeing the projects and their risks. As a group however we all got so caught up in our individual tasks that we completely forgot to prep for the presentation. This group failure was a part of why we decided not to challenge the first stage on the 28th.

Weeks 2 & 3 - Exploration

Senior Team Weeks 2 and 3 (9/7-9/20)

At the beginning of this sprint we decided which three games we were going to carry forward. We decided on a plant themed 2D side-scroller, a twist on the mech* genre where two players pilot the same mech and The Escaped Finnish Slave. The group decided that the Finnish game would make more sense to prove as a paper prototype, this would also allow us to feel out how the game would play before we committed ourselves in code. We decided that to make the best use of our two programmers we should each focus on one of the remaining games. Splitting our efforts allowed us to work more efficiently but reduced our communication. I think that the plan has worked out but it could easily have gone the other way. That one of my ideas made it to this stage helped pull me into the group. I still didn't always voice my opinions during the first week, but I found my footing in the end.

Plant Game:

A 2D side-scrolling, platforming adventure game where the player has a gun in each hand that the player can fire. The player can only aim one gun at a time.

This idea baffled me at first. Initial details had been light and I did not understand what differentiated the game from it's inspirations. As the newest member of the group I had thought that the ideas that the team had thought up during their summer brainstorm had been more fleshed out. I felt like I was feeling my way in the dark beyond the base mechanics. I did get input and help from the rest of the team when I needed it. We were also struggling with the art direction for this game which left me feeling rather isolated. For the first week I didn't even have any idea what the main character was. During our meeting on 9/14, I brought these problems up. We were able to settle on a general art direction and soon after I knew what the main character was and what he/she were fighting. After we started to get a feel for the art, the rest of the game started to fall into place. The movement system has proved to be difficult to nail down. Movement had already changed once by the end of the first week. After consulting with Micheal** I came up with a third system that felt much better. This third method has so far worked together with other mechanics in a simpler manner.

When we presented our game ideas during our Discipline meetings this game was generally thought to be the most in scope. We did get another important piece of feedback from the faculty though. Platformers, especially side-scrolling platformers have been done to death as senior games. If we go with this idea we will have to get the mechanics perfect or we will likely fail to continue on to the next semester.

The Mech Game:

A 1st(ish) person mech game where the mech is operated by a pilot and an engineer. This game started as a multiplayer battle arena game and is currently a coop mission based game.

The group unanimously voted to make this one of our three game ideas. Despite our shared enthusiasm for this project we were told during our Discipline meetings that this game was wildly out of scope. I have had less involvement in the coding side of this game so far. The main idea that we have been iterating within this game was the role of the second player. A crucial aspect of this game is making both roles fun, neither role should be the role everyone wants to play. When we started we loaded the second player down with a bunch of puzzle and action mechanics. After reviewing the roles we realized we had to have the second player commit to either the puzzle aspect or action aspect. The direction we went with depended on the feel of the rest of the game. One option was making puzzles central to the entire game by abstracting some of the activities of the game into puzzles. The other option was to fully commit to the first person action side. We decided that the game we wanted to make was more traditional and went with the first person action side of the mechanics.

The Finnish Game:

Too many puns. A survival game about a young escaped Finnish slave making the journey back home through a foreign land in 1100AD. Emphasis is on your isolation from the people surrounding you. 

When I come up with a game concept, it often has more story than mechanics. This was true here, but in this case the story ended up furnishing us with flavorful mechanics. We decided on a paper prototype for this game. When we started work on each of the games this one felt too large to make a good initial sale with. Early on we did not feel like we had a solid hold of the mechanics of the game. Every time we talked about the Finnish game we solidified and constrained it. This game is the most fun for me to work on because I love the history behind it and I love sharing that history with others. My initial worry was that the scale of the journey would be impossible to do in one map. I was also worried that problems would crop up trying to populate the sheer amount of space in the game. We solved these issues by breaking the game up into a linear series of incidents. In each of these incidents the player has a sandbox of choices of how to deal with the incident. An example of an incident is coming across a river that the character can't ford and having to find a way across.

*A Mech is a fictional humanoid tank usually operated by one person.

**The other programmer, and the original programmer for the team

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