Intial Major Project Ideas

I'm going to put a few of the concept ideas I had before we chose to go with UMBRA because, why not?

CLICK ME - Boat game concept (probably the one I fleshed out the most)


this was one of the lamer ideas

lmfao.. pms'ing this day maybe............... - minus pooping in lecturers chairs, I like mine. I think this mechanic would be more appreciated by engineering students with lecturers who don't upload their notes. (my boyfriend whinges about this)

WOOOO GAME DESIGN STUDENT FREEDOM WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Major Project RAAAAAAA (2/2)

Ten Pager document links as promised - excuse kinks! I wrote this up not long ago.. it's getting somewhere slowly :)

CLICK ME

Major project 2nd year RAAAAA (1/2)

Blue skying to the max for this Major Project. Ho, my god the team is more hyped than I ever seen. Why? HORROR GAME RAAAAAAAAA. Liam and Joe (team mates) love survival horror, so when our light mechanic stealth game started veering towards survival horror I could see there was going to be a great deal of enthusiasm. I think we're what, 4/5 days into the project? and we already have a ten pager, presentation, 2D maps, a working 3D example in UE4, forums, logos and research posts. I think the work ethic for this project is going to pretty great!

Here's the presentation to outline our idea that we're showing tomorrow :) I'll also post our ten pager to take a look at after this. (it'll probably help to make the presentation make sense, since I often just talk over images.)

Making Jelly Chasers! (1/2)

To kick off our second year we were given a brief about sweets. I'm good at them, so naturally had this one down. The brief outlined that you have to market the popular 'Jelly Babies' sweets with a game that appeals to 8 - 12 y/o.

We assembled our team and came up with a studio name that would win the hearts of all serious business people:

Eat your heart out disney

Our tutors rightly suggested this was perhaps not an appropriate team name/logo.

'No Hesitation, No Surrender'

Once we had a bit of a giggle we were ready to stop playing silly buggers and do some work. This brief was focused more on the paperwork side of game design, so you had to make a prototype level from your game idea (barely playable) and then write a GDD, TDD, ADD and Personal Journal for it. Here's a few screenshots of our prototype:

Start Screen

From player's perspective

 Inspiration for our game's mechanics came from the masterpiece that is KATAMARI. In Katamari you roll around a pile of junk, making it bigger and bigger. In our game, you run around as a Jelly baby, picking up smaller ones to grow larger. As you grow bigger, you can access more of the level.

View from above

On that concept, we made a picnic table. To climb the cake and other puzzles you'd have to be a certain size. The level has a timer to put the player under pressure when absorbing the other jelly babies and there were lots of fun little interact able points. Jesse Schell says you have to make 20 games before you start to make progress. Thank god we're on bloody number 2. ONWARD..

Making Jelly Chasers! (2/2)

I get excited when we're told we've got to do these game design documents. I think it's because I like looking at 'themes' on word and making it look pretty. Look here is my journal.

 

 Pretty, eh? TELL ME I'M PRETTy ok this has to stop. I'm good at these things when I get into them though - I think it's because I have Scott Roger's 'LEVEL UP' book and when I read it it doesn't make my eyes bleed. His GDD examples are a bloody god send:

He makes a great point about using drawings to explain ideas to the rest of the team. He draws comics to liven the GDD up and translate what he means a lot more clearly. This is something I'm definitely going to do the next time I make a GDD. Compared to his our document front page looked a bit boring....

Working with Engines: Unity

I haven't posted much by ways of individual work yet, so here's bit I've done in Unity. The Brief: Make a little 2D puzzle game to demonstrate knowledge of Playmaker and Unity. When coming up with a quick puzzle idea, this came to mind:

A simple toy maze which you tilt to roll the ball about. I decided this would be the basis for my puzzle and quickly set up some props in Unity. I called the game 'Cheese Run', with the logic that the ball is a piece of cheese that you navigate through objects to a mouse hole.

After popping some colliders on each of the objects and tweaking their physics properties I created a few simple levels. I made the materials bouncy for added difficulty of controlling the ball. 

Setting up the tilting function of the board was straightforward. Here's how I configured them in PlayMaker:

Click to Enlarge! 

Last but not least, I added a nice surprise to the win condition rather than just a "Well Done." 

Ta-Da! A mouse appears on screen, soon to be with an added thank-you squeak sound effect.

Presenting a Concept

After our practice with the board and fairy tail games our next group project was to last us till the end of the year; our task was to create a 2D game from start to finish. Our team, dubbed 'Insomiacs', came up with a concept that took inspiration from Japanese wood block prints. Here are some examples of images we were looking at whilst coming up with some ideas:

We established quickly that we didn't want to make a side-scrolling plat former and so an idea was formed that you would jump INTO the picture. The player solves mini-games on each layer to unlock the next; battling against a time limit to move further into the lovely print style backgrounds. Put simply, you are a Frog aiming for the Palace pond in the distance. Here are some slides from our presentation to industry. (It was like a Dragon's Den scenario.)

Adding a texture to the layer the player is currently playing on allows for easy recognition of what they can jump on /attack etc. 

We invested in a Frog suit for Andy and made him our mascot and logo. +10 Try hard points awarded. Got a 1st, worth.

Stay classy.