Week 5: Change in setting! (PART TWO)

As a group, we'll need to do a lot of research and background reading about Norse mythology in order to get the most out of our style. We've opened a new channel on our Slack collaboration called "#research". We've been having some interesting discussion as a team and have found the setting to be influencing our design choices in unexpected ways!

I've stopped by the library and got some books out.
[image]
This should keep me busy over the weekend!

Some examples of how the setting has ended up informing our design:

• It was already decided that the player could purchase permanent upgrades between in-level "journeys". We've now realised that we can use the Norse concept of magic runes for this purpose.
• Odin's raven companions, "Thought" and "Memory" served to survey the land and report their findings to him. In our game, these could be used as scouts, gathering information about upcoming levels. This would help the player to read the situation and make better choices regarding party composition.

Week 5: Change in setting!

Problem: Feedback informs us that our classic D&D-inspired fantasy setting is very generic and lacks any eye-catchingness. Consideration shows that this is true, and causes me to acknowledge my bias.

This was a big issue that needed to be solved ASAP so that we could continue to move forward with our design work in time for next week's presentation. It took us three meetings in the space of three days to come to a conclusion! Some of the hardest work we've had to do so far.


Step one: brainstorming! Two potential new settings were thought up:

• A steampunk/neo-victorian era world. 
• "Retro-futurism," an 80's style take on sci-fi. 

These very new ideas would certainly bring some uniqueness to our game. Our artists were encouraged to create some art as a demonstration of how these settings would work for PartyQuest:

After an intense group discussion, it was largely agreed that the main unique feature of the game would still work best in a fantasy setting- the party of heroes undertaking a quest. We were able to come up with three new fantasy settings:

• A world set in Scandinavian mythology, 
• A dark mysterious magical forest, 
• A world of floating islands prominently featuring skyships. 

While these are still fantasy settings, they are no longer generic- they posses a unique flair of their own. This is exactly what PartyQuest needs.

Following is some concept art grabbed from the net:

Dark and magical forest

Vikings and gods!

Sky islands

It took a lot of refining before we were able to decide that the Scandinavian/Viking setting would work best for us.

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Bonus edit:
In our discussions, the idea of combining settings was discussed. A very novel idea arose from this: A Scandinavian viking + 80's sci fi mashup. The idea of gangs of vikings wandering the streets wearing varsity jackets really appealed to me :P

Drawn by me.

This idea was actually taken seriously! However in the end we determined that it was too abstract of a concept to communicate in our game- we wanted the focus to be on gameplay and how that worked with the world, not on storytelling.

Week 4: MediaWiki

We have a new organisational tool this week! MediaWiki is an open-source PHP wiki package, that can be used to host Wikis of any description.

I've used wikis in game development before- they can be an excellent resource to be used alongside the game design document.
All the technical information about the game should go in the wiki. By giving each Class, Scene, Script, etc its own wiki page, it provides a logical way to list dev info such as animation lists, functions and their access levels, UI elements, and anything that's relevant. It also makes all this info accessible and easy to search.

One of my first tasks this week is to populate our wiki with some basic pages and categories. From there, other team members will be able to fill in some info about character stats and the level generation algorithm. The wiki will continue to grow alongside our game design info!

EDIT: We've now integrated the wiki with Slack- team members will now be notified of any new pages or edits!

Week 4: Making Players Want To Swap Characters

One of the main mechanics in PartyQuest is the ability to swap between different playable characters that have different attributes and abilities.

A constraint in our current design is that it must be possible to complete any given section of level with any character- if all your ranged heroes are dead, you still need to be able to progress using a melee hero! Otherwise there would be a lot of frustration.

An example of why levels must be beatable with all hero types. Excuse the stickmen!

Some of the most important feedback from Laz in Week 2 is that players may become attached to a single hero, and only feel the need to use that one. This leads to a situation where other heroes go unused, and if/when the favoured hero dies, there is no reason to continue playing.

Thanks to my new group members, we were able to come up with a solution at today's meeting!

The Damage Triangle

Each character will have one of three "damage types". Certain damage types will be super-effective against certain enemies! This rewards players for swapping to the correct character, and encourages keeping all characters alive. If a player was to lose one of their characters in combat, they wouldn't be too harshly punished, either. We're confident that, if executed properly, this is a great solution to our problem.

Week 3: Final Game Pitch

Final pitch presentations were today. I felt a little unprepared- I might have been able to improve the way I presented. Regardless, I got the necessary information across and recieved some valuable feedback from Laz and Alex.

Below are the key points of feedback (which I've fleshed out a little):

• Refine scope
• Present a defined narrative
• Character personalities/backgrounds
• Setting and story 

• How our "retro fantasy theme" is different to other 80s fantasy games
• Draft some art:
• More character art (with narrative)
• Background art
• Level art
• UI Elements

I aim to address these points at tonight's team meeting, and have solutions to present at next week's "desk critiques".

Week 3: First Team Meeting

After recieving a lot of interest in PartyQuest, I organised a team formation meeting (using a Doodle Poll to do so. Great tool.) which took place this afternoon.

The meeting overall was a great success. Following an agenda, we were able to quickly introduce ourselves and nail down all the important team formatting issues.

The meeting's agenda.

Key points of the meeting:

• The team will include a full suite of seven members.
• Three artists
• One designer
• Three programmers
• The individual team member's skillsets allow for a lot of cross-disciplinary work, including sound design and UI design.
• We'll be using Unity, BitBucket (with the SourceTree client), and Game Maker 8 (for rapid prototyping)
• Team meetings will follow the scrum format, effective immediately.
• Three weekly meetings. Meeting times are as follows:
• Mondays from 3:30pm
• Wednesday tutorials from 9-11am
• Weekend "Working Bees" with flexible hours, on Saturday or Sunday

Week 2: Second Pass at Pitches

The main points to reflect on following the Week 2 round of games pitches are:

• The reception of my game pitch

and

• Interesting points of other game pitches

To begin, I believe my pitch was well recieved amongst my peers. I attribute this to having an engaging presentation and being able to effectively convey my vision for PartyQuest.

Including GIFs like this in my presentation helped to draw and maintain attention without distracting from what I was saying.

Important feedback points:
In my presentation, I presented two different options for game progression:

The audience was most receptive to the "one big level" idea. This is due in part to the "campsite" mechanic I presented, which fits the game very well thematically.

Following the presentation, a very important point was presented by Lazaros. How do you effectively encourage players to swap between characters? I'll need to consider this in-depth before the final pitch.

Other Game Pitches
The pitches I was most keen to hear the progress of included: Point the Way, The Skeleton War, Icarus (previously The Super Ultimate Championship Games of the Universe), The Red Enemy and Cobra.

After putting so much critical effort into my own presentation, it was hard not to be critical of other presentations! However for the purpose of reflection and group formation, taking a positive consideration as well would be beneficial, so I'll strive to do that.

The best and most interesting points of the day included:

• "Icarus" has come a long way from the initial concept. It's now quite simple and almost a little elegant. Could be fun to work on.
• Cobra has had a change in focus as a response to feedback from the last pitch.
• Point the Way has a great concept, but seems exceptionally difficult to execute. While I really like the idea, I'm inclined to stay away from that project.

Week 1: Refining My Pitch

During my first pass at the game pitch, I didn't use a PowerPoint presentation. While this was fine at the time, it would've been a benefit to me regardless! So for Week 2, I intend to create something especially nice to look at.

I personally hate presentations that are all text- I believe that a few pretty images go a lot further than repeating yourself via text. This has been reinforced after watching the Week 1 pitches.

Ideally, my presentation will have:

• No more than two lines of text per slide. (EDIT: Harder than it sounds...)
• Pretty GIFs.
• Images that are examples of what I'm talking about.
• At least one diagram.

EDIT: Here's a link to my finished presentation!