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...