01/11/2013
Since I last wrote here I was right in the middle of creating some of the main enemies and characters of our game. We had a meeting Wednesday the 23rd where we started testing with our paper prototype and going through some of our more fundamental systems. When we called it a day we each had our assignments and mine was to continue working with main characters and enemies. Sometime later we had our first test presentation, our lead designer had been sick for the last few days and just hours before our scheduled presentations we finally got ahold of him, only to find out he hadn’t put any work down into our pitch, which was his primary duty. We started working on the pitch ourselves and luckily there was a delay with our presentation which gave us some extra time working on it. Because we were so close to the project itself we all had a hard time making the pitch understandable for outsiders. To us, it was clear as day what we wanted and how the game works. After our presentation we found out that we had a lot of changes to make.
I got the sense that the “judges” liked our core concept but didn’t quite understand what the game was actually about, we lacked some core mechanics and our pitch wasn’t nearly as comprehendible as we thought it was. Some of the things that we decided to change were: skip the games narrative section, no one’s going to want to watch cutscenes in a shoot’em’up game. We also decided to lose the ability to shoot enemies and focus on two core features: escaping / fleeing and digging. We also found out that we had some work left on our paper prototype and after refining our games main mechanics and aesthetic goals we could really see a change for the better. Since we decided to not have a narrative part in our game we decided that giving the main enemies clothing and also having humans as enemies wasn’t really working, so I started over on almost all characters. I’m beginning to see some major improvements in my own drawing abilities and I am now confident enough to do all the characters from beginning to end all by myself.
Alex Westerdahl 