Thoughtless Badger – Development diary

Sunday 13/09/2013

Thoughtless Badger

Today our intentions was to take a look at the basic ideas for our paper prototype that one of us was supposed to look at. We also took a look at some of the drawings I had made of some of the main characters: badgers, protagonist (both male and female) and some basic surroundings.
I’m not that comfortable with hand drawings, even though you can clearly see what I was going for I feel that I’m better suited with the task of doing very basic sketches and setting the overall theme for the artwork, such as adding a more cartoonish style to the drawings or applying more light, darkness etc. I’m planning to let some of the others artists in the group make the final touches to my drawings and to let them make sure it looks good. One of our artists was out of town when we began and so the task of drawing fell entirely on me. Today he finally joined us and we could actually do as we had planned. We decided it was best I continued with characters and also start drawing some of the weapons that the enemies was going to use while our other artist started helping our lead designer with the storyboard and also tackle some of the main surroundings.

Thoughtless Badger – Development Diary 2

Wednesday 09/09/2013

Thoughtless Badger

Today we each pitched our individual high concept ideas, trying to brainstorm a core concept.
We each had some good ideas all ranging from distant planets populated all by badgers and other settings were humans ruled the world. Without going into detail, we decided upon one setting where badgers and humans populate the same world, but it is as if they live in separate times and perhaps whole different world. After deciding upon some basic core ideas and concepts we started to think it was time to start working on some individual tasks, and since I was lead artist I started working on some of the concept art. I felt it was a bit too early to start drawing lead characters, so I started sketching some environments and some general characters instead. Our game features some levels taking place underground and with that in mind I started researching some mines and I also looked up some badgers and some of the clothing used in the roaring twenties, because as mentioned the badgers and humans live on the same world but they are both very different from each other, for example: as an comic twist of sorts we implemented different themes for the two races:
the badgers dress as if they somehow got stuck in the roaring twenties, and the humans dress as if they are from our own time, the present so to say.

Thoughtless Badger – First Meeting

Monday 07/09/2013

Thoughtless Badger

Today we took some time to get to know each other and also got assigned a role based on what we were good at and what we felt we wanted to do. I became lead artist. We started brainstorming a high concept but everyone was tired and after about 2 hours we called it a day. Everyone had some good ideas but the those ideas were things we needed to take care of further on in the design process so we urged everybody to write down their ideas and save them for later. One thing we actually achieved was choosing our “target audience”: guys aged 13 – 18. I’m not saying that girls can’t play our game but we decided it would be easier for us to make guys our target gender, seeing how we are only guys in the group. Our task is to design a “innovative” game and making guys aged 13-18 yrs old our target audience isn’t the most fresh idea but we decided to have innovative thinking in gameplay and setting and somewhat find a new take on shoot’em’up’s. We decided to meet up the next Wednesday and pitch our high concept ideas. Although we didn’t achieve that much on our first meeting I feel really relieved that we actually got things moving, things have been a bit blurry or so to speak, we haven’t had any concrete tasks or guidelines regarding this major assignment and I wanted to get started. And seeing how we’re already one week late, to actually be getting our heads out of our asses felt good.