Computer Games Design

First day of Computer Games Design.

25/09/2012

Today we arrived at 9 for the lecture in a room that ended up being too small for 66 students, only seating 30. We got introduced to Open Wonderland which seems an interesting idea and something that I am keen to try. Then we had our lecture which was short and described what the module would contain and what the goal of the module was.
Then we had to pick our own groups of between 2-4 people, me and my friend Calum decided to just go with the two of us, although this could mean extra work we thought the fact that we got on well meant that we would disagree a lot less and be able to be honest with each other and add to each other's ideas, which could make things easier in the long run of the process.
During the labs today between 10 and half 11 we had a brainstorm and got a reasonable idea of the kind of game we want to do and a base story idea and characters, along with the type of enemies we would like to use and the setting we would like it to be in.
Our game would be aimed at the pc/console gaming market as it would be quite a large game and we would like the graphics to be detailed and very impressive. We were inspired by both films and other games. We decided we would go for a story only based game, as we felt there is not as many games with story only and it would be an easier market to sell our game to as opposed to the multi-player market. At first we were thinking of making it similar to Final Fantasy type games except with different combat, but still melee weapons only. One of the key features of our game will be that we will have a companion, which will be a dog like creature and the setting will be post apocalyptic, ideas which we got from the film I am legend. The type of dog/creature we were looking at is similar to a Skag from Borderlands and maybe an Orc riders dog from lord of the rings, just a few ideas we were playing with. We thought maybe the character could start very young and something happens with the characters parents and they abandon him/get killed. We want the leveling system to go by age with both characters starting young and growing up together via experience points, ie experience points mature both characters.

Week  2 of Computer Games Design

02/10/2012

This week the labs were changed to the morning. So we went in the morning and got to work. Today we spent basically all of our time creating the story of the game and a few ideas changed. We decided to not make growth change via experience but you still grow up via time lapses, similar to the start of fallout. We decided on our ending also and the fact that it will be a triple choice ending and each choice will have its own consequence. We have completed the story and just require someone to read over it as we obviously created it so are biased.

Week 3 of Computer Games Design

09/10/2012
Today we started the game documentation. We created a title page and wrote down a few pages of the design document. We got a picture from online to illustrate the ideas of the type of place the game would be set and also what we can imagine the terrain looking like.

Week 4 of Computer Games Design

16/10/2012

This week we got a new member in the group called David. A lot of the time used was spent on introducing each other and discussing the ideas we already had, explaining the game we would like to create. He seems to like our idea and is interested to work on it with us also. Then we spent a little time also working on the game design document.

Week 5 of Computer Games Design

23/10/2012

Week 5 we spent again getting to know David a bit more, and started the pitch as we discussed and agreed it was more important to get that finished sooner, to have time to practice. We decided on our theme for the presentation and the slides that we were going to have in it.We set up the slides and then set them to the format we would like

Week 6 of Computer Games Design

30/10/12

In week 6 we just got going with the presentation, working on it mostly together, collaborating ideas and writing them down we got our first 3 slides done, the overview part 1, the overview part 2 and the setting and environment. We Also got a watermark done for the background in our setting and environment slide.

Week 7 of Computer Games Design

6/11/12

Week 7 we spent again on the pitch, doing most of the other slides, and Calum did a drawing for what the character could look like. We did the companion slide, which lead to much discussion because it was such a big feature in the game, so we were not sure what parts to include because we could only include so much in order to fit it into the 15 minute time-scale for the presentation.

Week 8 of Computer Games Design

13/11/12

In week 8 we continued our work on the pitch, taking the story we had already written and writing out the shorter version's in order to get them into the time we had. Then we had to strip it down further in order to get it onto the slides. We got all the story slides finished today including the introduction scene and the End scenario.

Week 9 of Computer Games Design

20/11/12

This week I worked on the presentation myself and Calum worked on the game design document. we got a lot of work done today, the slides are almost finished just getting pictures together and editing them to put them on the slides and making sure they look right. Also Calum got 3/4 of the way through the game design document, also including pictures.

Week 10 of Computer Games Design

27/11/12

Today we finished off the slides and the game design document, formatted everything correctly so that it all looked right and and fitted well. Started thinking what we were going to say in our slides, Calum and David were quite nervous, I was calm though.

Week 11 of Computer Games Design

4/12/12

This week we all took our slides that we were going to talk about and wrote down everything we were going to say and rehearsed our lines, hoping we would be able to remember them for next week.

Week 12 of Computer Games Design

11/12/12

Today we came in early to rehearse a little more before our presentation and try to polish what we were going to do. Then we did our presentation. I think we did okay, however we ran out of time, even though we thought it was only going to last around ten minutes, but there was a few dead silences by David and Calum who were nervous about doing the presentation, which slowed us down, we only had around 10-15 seconds more content to go through, so we were unlucky really. If we went more indepth to the business side of the game then the presentation would have been more successful, however it is a bit more indepth in the game design document.