Games Project : Design & Planning Week 5

Our progress on our game design continued once again with a creative theme this week as our targets for this week were to design a vertical level, present 3 boss characters with personalities and discuss ideas for melee weapons to be used by both the main character and enemies throughout the game.

The whole idea was that our character would make his way through each level but after a some discussion in the previous week we came to the conclusion that it would be best to split the game up from being completely horizontal by having a vertical based level so that the player won't be always moving to the left or to the right of the screen.

This concept was for a night club themed level as I had also based a boss design on being a sort of pimp and once the player progressed through the night club they would then have to fight against him. 

We are still discussing the vertical level and what theme it shall have but we are always bringing good ideas to the table and sometimes even merging a few together to give two okay ideas something to make something great. 

The character that I had designed for this was originally inspired by a character from the 'Saints Row' franchise called "Zimos" as he has the unique 'pimp' style that I was looking for with the stereotypical flamboyant hat with a feather, the cane and the platform shoes. This style was one that I would hope to use to inspire a concept for a character and looking at the final piece I hope it shows that it has been an inspired piece. 

For the potential boss list we each had to create a name and a personality for them as this would give us something to work on later when we started to create assets. 

Below are just two examples of the sort of work we were doing:

. Darryl 'The Swift' King

 The idea behind this character is that he would have a large frame and  would be a slow heavy target. He would use his fists or knuckle  dusters as a weapon.

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Our last task was to each present our own ideas on what weapons could be scattered throughout the game that an enemy or player could use to fight with. We each had to think about what items could be found in a 'hood' or gang area.

Here are some of our ideas :

. Police Baton

. Crowbar

. Stack of Cash

. Baseball Bat

. Sledge Hammer

. Fire Extinguisher 

The fact that we all have shown our artists and creative abilities and is continuing to give us confidence in ourselves as we have something physical to show for our steady progress we are making to coming closer to completing the design process.

Games Project : Design & Planning Week 4

This week our focus was mainly pointed at concept art/level design and character development. Our task was for each team member to create 3 gang names, 1 protagonist name, a back story for the protagonist and then design 2 side scrolling levels. It was a week for each of us to express a lot of creativity and then display physically rather than vocally so it was quite interesting to see what each of us would produce.

Although one of our targets for this week was to give a reason for our protagonist being in the hospital we did decide to go with the idea that our team leader brought when he originally pitched the concept except we believed it would be better if he was visiting a fellow gang member rather than his mother. Moving onto the next part of the job list for this week we each discussed different ideas and spoke about the concept art and story boarding we had each completed. In particular our team leader told us that we had nailed the task and exceeded what he had expected. His original idea and meaning was a simple storyboard but myself and fellow team member had gone above this and designed a scene from a level as shown below.

Our next task was to come up with some gang names and protagonist names that we could use throughout our game and possibly enhance our back story. Each of us had to think about a potential gang name and then decide whether or not that it was already taken and then if it would fit with the theme and style of our game.
Here are some of the gang names we came up with :

. Backstreet Rollers
. Shingleton Project Mafia
. Four Fingered Fists
. Macks
. Dread Sons

Our next task was to decide on a main character name however each of us had already thought about boss names as we had looked into this for week 4 but decided to add it onto week 5 because we didn't know how much time concept art would take. In the end we decided to use a combination of a potential boss names and create our protagonists name "Marquise  ".

Looking at this week I feel that we are far ahead as our team leader specified that he was going to add in concept art in week 6 and since we have already completed some we can focus on other things that week instead. All in all this design process seems to be going well and we are making good headway to completing this game.

Games Project : Design & Planning Week 3

Week 3 began with our team meeting where we all brought forward our ideas for a team name/company name. After much thought and discussion we decided on 'Insoluble Studios'. Once we had sorted out our team name we moved onto talking about the risk analysis and research for our game. The research that we looked into and studied mainly focussed on the theme of gangs in games and films/TV because this would give us a clear idea of how successful and how well a gang related game would be received.

Our research mainly took a financial based approach as more often than not the revenue of a game, TV series or movie will give a good idea of how well it was received by the media and consumers. 

. Gangster Squad - $60 Million Budget - $105.2 Million Revenue - Overall Positive Reviews

. Get Rich or Die Tryin' - $40 Million Budget - $46.4 Million Revenue - Mixed/Poor Reviews

. Straight Outta Compton - $28 Million Budget - $196.5 Million Revenue - Very Positive Reviews

. GTA: San Andreas - Sold 27.5 Million Copies *1- Very Positive Reviews 

. Legend - $25 Million Budget - $18.3 Million Revenue *2 - Overall Positive Reviews

Our conclusion after looking at these figures was that in general gang related games and films do tend to sell and will be received well by the consumer however another point of research for our games focussed on the fact that violence is a predominant theme we decided to look into how violence is received by the media and what publicity can follow.

. GTA: San Andreas - Violent themes and sexual assault were scrutinised by the media

. Hatred - Extremely negative criticism and a very controversial game over the mass killing that takes place

Although just two examples there the fact that the presence of violence in games will be frowned upon so we believed that we would still have violence as it is necessary but the risk of the negative media provokes the thought that bad publicity is still publicity as demonstrated by the game 'Hatred'. This game was surrounded by negativity however we do not believe that our game will be anywhere near as controversial as this but we still had to look at the fact that our game could be looked at as a game that is promoting violence and gang warfare. 

Overall this week we have made strong progress and have pressed forward with our design process and I feel that we will keep ahead of schedule.

Games Project : Design & Planning Week 2

This week began with our continued discussion on a team name and our game idea. We believe we have finalised our idea and the genre/style of the game so hopefully we can fully flesh out and develop this idea and next year create and present it. The original pitch was given by our team leader, Ben McLean, and he really sold us the idea of the game. His passion and flare for it convinced us to pursue this idea and create this game.

"We're going to create a 2D side Scroller in the Unreal Engine. The game is going to be set in a fictitious city similar to that of California. The character you play as is a man known as (X) a local known gangster who is visiting his mother in the hospital far away from his "Hood". The point of the game is to get from point A to point B in the grand scale of things like all 2D Sidescrollers. Each level will be referred to as 'Hoods' and will gradually get more and more difficult. In order to make it more platform like there will be opportunities for the character to jump up on roofs/climb scaffolding. We can implement a boss system so occasionally the player will have to fight a Boss character which will be the Kingpin of that gang which can have different mechanics in order to create a diverse experience. We can also implement a shop system in order to obtain new weapons and health."

In the later weeks we hope to expand much more on this, however, as far as a pitch goes he put his heart into it and we really believe that we're onto something here. Once we start to research similar themes and how we can pull this together I reckon we will be able to see our idea and game come to fruition.

During our meeting we discussed the topics and points we wanted to have completed and once again I think that we on target and, even though it's on week 2, I feel confident that we will be able to stay ahead of the game and keep ahead.

. Each member to create 3 team names 

. Finalise our game idea and platform

. Provide marketing research and give two reasons why our game will succeed

. Provide one risk of our chosen genre and style

. Investigate team name copyright laws and legislation 

Week 2 ended with very positive feedback from our lecturer and as a team I believe we all feel much happier to know that the way we are working through this design process is exactly what he is looking for. We are feeling confident that we can produce a high quality document and eventually a high quality game.