week 11 - We're....done?(well, the game design document at least)

It was a long journey and there were many bumps on the road. I quite honestly under-estimated how much work needed to be done in order to achieve the final result that is our game design document. I'm just glad  I don't have to print it out for anyone or I may feel the wrath of Green Peace for the amount of trees I'd need to print on.

We found after we thought we were done and doing a last lookover, that we were missing certain bits of the required specification that had been layed out, this ultimately led on from one bit to another and resulted in giving us a nice bed time the night before hand in date of 4am.

The sigh of relief that swept over us was monumental.

I thought it would have been made easier as I was working with two guys I've known pushing 3 years and have travelled my higher education path with them since college. How wrong I was. It was certainly a bonus at times but we had to be really careful that we sorted out any disagreements or differences of opinion amicably or the whole project was put in jeopardy. Thankfully we all have solid heads on strong shoulders, and as a result, this proved to be a minor issue.

All that's left for us to work on is the pitch which takes place on the 10th of January at 11 o'clock. I'm confident that this will run with success as we all feel passionately about our game. Stay tuned for a final blog after the presentation to hear how it went!

Week 10 - almost there

The main story arc is finalised! Took a while but we got there in the end.  All we need to do is implement era stories and the game is complete. This is our plan of action this week and we should be done come next Tuesday - attention spans permitting.

Here's a look at it for the moment.

The year is 2112. Dreamscape has been hard at work with its development of the Somnium technology, named as such, as this is the Latin word for dream. Ready to reveal the technology to the world, an advertising campaign is launched to promote it. Marketed towards the rich and famous, the experience can be referenced as a millionaire’s playground.

This is an experience of a lifetime. Live in the shoes of a Knights Templar, fight as a red coat mercenary, experience the turmoil of the Salem witch trials from the perspective of a witch or choose to walk in the footsteps of a successful scientist who has studied dreams as his specialized field.

However it’s not all blank cheques and satisfied customers. In order to provide the ultimate thrill to their paying customers, Dreamscape needs to gather resources from the dead. Those very same actions and methods used on the dead have caught the eye of a Left-Wing Human Rights activist group. The group has one monolithic issue with Dreamscape - they believe those that are dead should remain dead and respected - not disturbed and used in a scientific recreational activity for the well off.

As a result, a virus codenamed ‘DV8’ is developed and implemented into the P.O.D by one of the group who has secured undercover work at Dreamscape.

As the customers are enjoying the exciting lives of those they have chosen, they start to realise something is not quite right. The virus has taken hold and their virtual reality world is suddenly becoming very, very real. The notice that they start to experience pain like never before, instead of being able to live the experience as the person they have plugged into, they start to notice weird anomalies within the world, buildings changing shape, monsters and characters that seem to appear as if they don’t belong in the era that the rest of the area is in, and it’s quickly realised that Dreamscape MUST do something to help them.

Week 9 - Things are wrapping up nicely

As we approach our 12 week deadline the game design document is filling up well and is almost finished.
I use the term almost finished loosely here though as there is always a point where you re-read over something and realise you need to make adjustments to it for everything else to make sense.

I was having a bit of a hard time writing within the document how the player would choose the Scientist class, as the idea of the pod for Somnium was that upon entering the pod the player would be faced with his class choice.

In my Scientist backstory, I'd written initially that he was a university graduate that was recruited to work for Dreamscape on the somnium project, however I've had to tweak this slightly.

We have decided that the Scientist was the person that came up with the idea of Somnium, however died before his work could be completed. His work has since been carried out by Dreamscape, and customers have the option to play out the part of the man that started it all.

He soon finds himself thrown into the deep-end when the machine starts to malfunction and he is called upon by Dreamscapes senior analyst to perform what starts off as light debugging routines, to uncovering a virus named DV8 that has been introduced to Dreamscape's systems by a left-wing human rights organisation (with terrorist tendancies) that wish to sabotage Dreamscapes projects due to the nature of the Somnium system.

Will update further with hopefully the final progress.

Signing off....

Week 8 - Deadlines are drawing in!

So within about 5 minutes of Jim starting the lecture the realisation hit us - it's almost hand-in date! With our working hats firmly attatched to our heads, we devised a plan to get as much done as possible. More collaboration took place between myself and Bryan as there are a couple of Game design doc areas we are working on jointly, in order to tackle the bigger topics.

I feel I can reveal a bit more to you guys, the avid readers wondering what the vagueness surrounding our game idea is. Pretty much because Tom and Bryan have basically advertised it on their respective blogs from day one where-as I took the more 'protect your IP' approach that was drummed into me since college and only gave away breif details here and there.

The game idea is done! A cracking start on our paperwork and I've been nominated 'the guy' that collects everyones data and puts it niceley into the document.

More about the game then...

So in the last couple of blogs I hinted at some Matrix/Assassin's creed-esque ideas we were implementing. Initially I had drawn up a background for the scientist which explained that he worked for Dreamscape's Somnium project as an oneirologist(a studier of dreams) - however upon working out how to implement this particular character choice, I've had to change that a little.

The Somnium system lets a user 'plug into' a memory core of someone past-lived. It is the beleifs of this human rights group, that once a person is dead, they should reserve the right to rest in peace. Dreamscape however beleive that no harm can come of this experience and think of it more as a themepark ride for the wealthy, a way for them to escape the mundane life they may lead ( money can't buy you happiness afterall). The virus unleashed on Somnium is intended to bring the systems into disrepair, and Dreamscapes reputation along with it.

More to be added as the Game design doc comes to a head...

Over and out..

Week 7 - Unproductive?

Another week, another potential opportunity to drill down some ideas for our game. We spent the morning bantering ideas around and expanding on ideas originally explored and even wrote off some ideas that we felt were no longer required.

The lecture itself on monday lasted a whopping 15 minutes so that gave us a lot of time to get stuck into the thick of it, we tended to digress a bit from the task in hand but managed to punch out  more of a solid 'backstory' to the game and give it a bit more 'meat. I showed the backstory of the scientist world to the other guys and got some feedback to amend some things and improve on it so a finalised version of it could be produced. Bryan took the map of the game world away to work on, and will have a map of the world to look at by next week, Tom took away the feedback of the concept pictures he drew up, with a view to draw them in a bit more detail. I proceeded with my assigned tasks for the game design document and will update more information as it becomes available.

Unproductive? In sheer scope of the work achieved on the day there wasn't much done physically but we took away a lot of ideas to work on and write up more of the game we are creating.

Untill next time...

week 6 - Multiplayer!

We weren't in the best frame of mind when we met up, lack of sleep in all three members played a big part in that, however we did manage to discuss how we were going to incorporate multiplayer.

We talked about the different ways that other games implemented multiplayer and I mentioned that I much prefered local co-op (on the same machine) and the others mentioned they preferred multiplayer online (via xbox live etc)

We agreed that the multiplayer will be localised, however would have online capabilities to play with up to 3 other friends in a party over the likes of xbox live. In the instance where 4 people were playing on seperate consoles, the game would choose the person with the best network connection to host the game.

We discussed at length the possibility of hosting the multiplayer on a dedicated server however due to the costs involved in keeping a server up, and maintained, we decided that matchmaking and finding the best host would be the best user eperience.

The game will still play in its entirety in the multiplayer as it would in the single player, however you would play each persons part of the story out once at a time (E.g Templar is party leader - three friends are in the party playing). The story played through will be the templars portion of the story until this is complete at which point a world transition will take place and the next person in the party's story will load with the rest of the party in tow, helping out.

More information will be updated as it's available on this.

Until next time...

Week 5 - its all coming together

Tuesdays lecture provided some insight into the term 'gameplay'. It delved into types of challenges people encounter during games in a good bit of detail. This is something I discussed with the group when the style of game came up as a topic for our own project.

Puzzles are the main theme for challenges we will include alongside some combat and problem solving challenges.

On the back of this, we assigned roles to each member to work on for our game design document.

Tom will do the overview, world layout and character rendering, will take on the feature set and has already started work on the levelling system and combat systems. As he is doing the combat system he is also taking care of detailing the weapons. I am taking on the details of the single player game, user interface (with Bryan), and the game world with the assistance of Bryan also. We will all work on other aspects which will culminate in our finished product.

Stay tuned for more specifics...

Week 4 - Man down!

We were a team member missing this week which left Tom and I holding the fort so to speak. We decided to take a risk and create a bit more of a backstory to the intro of our game to answer a few unanswered questions that I felt were existing. After hashing out ideas and scenarios to explain why our main character was looking to escape from reality, we put down a final scenario that we thought was rather good.

However things are never that easy and after sending our proposed back story to our absent member, he felt that it was unnecessary for the type of game genre we were pursuing.

After much debate we agreed to sideline the idea and pursue a more open sandbox approach. A 'choose your own adventure' so to speak. We are however developing back stories for characters inside somnium - the dream pod machine that will make up our 4 players who are 4 individuals experiencing somnium at the same time.

Watch this space...

Week 3 - Character archetypes and backstory

Today our lecture was on character archetypes and the back story for the character backgrounds and level design. Much thought had already went into the types of character we were going to have in our game and a general idea of their background had started to formulate in our heads.

With our game concept, we have a relatively unique ability to have such diverse character backgrounds due to the nature of the game, meaning a fair bit of research is needed by us as a group to gather information on the timelines the key characters are set in.

When the game is played as single player, the character played will adopt the 'Hero' archetype - by that I mean that the story centralizes around that character, normally a resolver of conflict which the story is based on, and will often change and adapt to keep the players interest high.

We also discussed what goes into a game setting - what sets the scene when the player takes the helm of our character and starts to play, it could be the little things such as the small attention to details, buildings, scenery - music and sound can also play a part in this as well - a up beat song in a particular area may for instance, give off the impression that the area is a thriving town where there are lots of people interacting with one another, laughing, joking, etc, where a tune with more dramatic sounding tones may give the impression that there is impending doom around the corner for the player exploring a certain area and players may feel slightly on edge - as though something is about to jump out at them at any given moment.

With this lecture in mind, we set about delving deeper into our four main characters back story to give a bit of substance to the players, something that would make the player think 'this is why I picked this character' or 'this is why this particular event has happened in the story'.

Once we discussed this we assigned a couple of tasks to each other to work on for next week. I am expanding on the scientist characters background, and also the level design of his particular 'future world'. I have a few ideas banding about but it's something I will work more on during the week and drill down to a solid back story that doesn't sound too far fetched - but interesting enough to make players want to choose him. I have a mental image of his version of the world too in my head so will try and draw up some rough concept art to accompany it. This will be a decent enough challenge for me and I should have this done for next week so that we can draw our information together and start to press on.

Tom is working on the witch and her back story and level design and Bryan has taken on the templar and mercenary characters to develop further. As we discuss the game further and further, the sheer scope of the challenge just seems to open up at an exponential rate and it's something myself and the group are starting to feel pretty excited about. The potential for more is so big. I'll add some concept art as soon as it's ready.

Stay tuned...

Week 2

So today we worked out our core concept for our game after initial thoughts about it last week. Not wanting to give too much away at present, I can describe the overall idea. The player will engage within 4 different worlds and over a series of 4 characters. Although the 4 worlds will be set along different time lines based on factual time lines  the only reference to these will be the style of attire the npcs and playable avatar will wear as well as the architecture of the buildings.

The avatar will change depending on the timeline visited, however the game will have a persistent environment, meaning that upon creation of a new game, the clock is ticking - players will feel a sense of urgency to play the game as npcs, quests etc can change locations depending on amount of time passed since the game was created. Tom Bryan and myself brainstormed for a few hours today to get a solid basis ironed out using the notes we took last week.

So far the game seems to be taking shape in terms of back story and Bryan is working on expanding it while liaising with Tom and I for further ideas and input. We aren't prepared to reveal our unique selling point quite yet but once we have the story tight we can reveal a bit more. I will be working on Storyboards and flowcharts to aid our perception in pitching the game to potential financial backers so will upload some in the coming weeks. I will be able to help the others with any tasks they need done once my own are out the way as well.

Stay tuned for further progress reports.

Computer games design - week 1

So I had my first lecture on computer games design today which seems to take an in-depth look at what actually goes into a game, and the thought behind it. Having touched on the design aspect while I was studying my HNC back in college, I knew to an extent, the level of research, brainstorming and discussions that would need to be done in order to achieve great results. The way our lecturer, Jim Scullion, put it was: 'What you put in, will be what you get out'.

In other words, if you slack off and skive, or only do the minimal amount of work required, then the resultant grade will only be a moderate mark. This was to be expected of course, and after a brief decision on who our group consisted of, we set out to talk about our idea for our game design document, and pitch.

After lots of great ideas, fielded by Bryan Watson, Tom Beattie and Myself added our input, resulting in us managing to drill down a couple of solid ideas for the basis of our subject game. We agreed on a top down RPG adventure game as the basis for our game design document, and in the coming weeks, work towards getting a lot of the specifics worked out so that we have a solid document that we can pitch.

Watch this space..