First week of game development

Our first week of game design was mostly scrum documentation and going over our design document. We took some time to re-define the game we had chosen to develop – Dangerous Dander. After some thought we had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted to change and what we wanted to keep. Our vision was keeping the original game’s aesthetic goals and going for a different approach in setting, of course there were some details in mechanics we decided to alter but I won’t go into detail. Our last project was Bloody Badgers, a game in which I was involved with graphics, both concept and in game features such as level design. Although I thought that was a hoot, there was always a part of me wanting to write a soundtrack and with our current project I finally got the chance to do so. I got right to it and started carrying my guitar with me to school instead of my paper and pencils. I’ve had quite a lot of time fiddling with my guitar and recording various riffs and songs both in studios and at home over the years but very few of them were pieces that had any sort of deadline tied to them and none of them was to be used in serious work, I don’t have any trouble with producing a song for that purpouse, in fact i think it’s more fun that way, but my inspiration however is the one who decides to leave me in my hour of need. Most of my riffs come to me in middle of class or 3:am at night, therefore its extremely important for me to always have a way to get those ideas to paper. Luckily there are many ways for me to do that. Writing a song to a game is in many ways like developing a game, there are a lot of things you need to think about, the most important one being to make sure that the song support your aesthetic goals, For example you might not want to write reggae to a hack’n’slash game and you might not want to write hip hop to a horror game like Silent Hill.  My task this past week has been to write a song in three parts, one for each state of our ”PumpedMeter” – High, Medium and Low. I’ve decided to go with somewhat of a ”punkish” sound with hints of heavy guitars and drums. It is not going to be a masterpiece and I’ve decided to try and keep things simple, I’ve laid down bass tracks using a DropTune pedal and I’ve decided to go with midi-generated drums.

Thoughtless Productions – Summary of the last 2 weeks of work.

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 23^rd 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.

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.