Games Project : Design & Planning Week 6/7

This blog entry will be split across 2 weeks as we felt that we had assigned ourselves just a little too much work and believed that we would rather extend our work for 2 weeks and produce a good quality of work than have it for 1 week and produce something of low quality.

Our task list for the next two weeks were as follows :

. Develop and present one piece of concept art for a level
. Develop and present one piece of concept art for boss character.
. Develop and present one piece of concept art for a basic enemy.
. Develop and present one piece of concept art for protagonist character.
. Download Unreal Engine 4 and become familiar with the software

As a team we decided that this would be a two week long task as we would be creating a lot of art work and as none of us are very creative we felt that rushing this task would only create unneeded stress and in the end we want to produce high quality and work we can be proud of so we felt that having this task scale over two weeks would be beneficial. Having this over two weeks allowed us to spend more time honing key points of the game and start to brain storm different ideas that we could bring to our game.

Looking at the work that has been produced so far by our team I believe that it was definitely worth taking the two weeks to produce all of our work and take that extra time to complete it. I will post a few examples of our concept art below but I will also make a few posts containing all of the concept art we have worked on so far. Here are two examples of a basic enemy that you could encounter in the game.

Our focus on Unreal Engine was because we know that we will be using it next year in our Honours project so we felt it would be advantageous to learn how to use it now and then we would be one step ahead when next year comes round. We believe that by using UE4 we will be able to create our game just the way we want it in the sense that we will have the 3D effect we want but still remain a 2D side scroller. With this in mind we felt that spending time during this part of the year would mean that we would spend less time when we have to create the game learning UE4 in effect meaning we would be able to start straight away without delay.

Since working on the concept art for the design process I feel that myself and my other team member have gained a fuller insight into the genre we are working to create as to draw each of the characters and storyboards we had to go and look up gangsters, graffiti, gang tags and research the style of clothing they wore meaning that we are developing an understanding to this style and genre of game.

I feel that as a team we are really starting to show where our strengths and weaknesses lie and we are able to combat those. After these 2 weeks I feel that we will really start to blaze through the last remaining parts of our design. 

Our next tasks for the upcoming week will be :

. Discuss and present reasons why we chose this platform/genre

. Discuss and present the design aspects we wish to implement 

. Discuss and present the market and sale potential for our game