Week 4 - Bansho Ten'in Bitches

(Have you ever seen Summer Wars? I recommend it, it has such a brilliant art direction and has introduced me to the wonder-game that is Hanafuda Koi-Koi. Is it too late to change to making a game of that instead?)

Wednesday has a break-through of concept proportions. J has come up with the idea of using Buddhist mythology (do they even call it mythology? Do now, I guess), which has been something a few of us have enjoyed in anime such as Naruto, though we're hoping to keep it closer to the original than being a loose interpretation.

We've been considering specifically the 6 different paths life could take depending on the good or bad karma built up in previous lives: either you could be a human, animal, a ghost lusting after something from a past life, a demon 'spending' amassed bad karma, a demi-god such as a titan, or a god similar to the flawed Greek gods.

Within the game, we'd have the main character be the Human Path, being the most identifiable to players visually from the start. As I had said before, Naruto would be a key source of inspiration in some ways, from the character Pain as each Path of his has very unique abilities. Deciding which Path will do what is going to be tricky, so one doesn't overpower the others and you end up playing it all the time.

With this in mind, we actually decided that this type of game would be best for a 3D environment and wouldn't really work as a 2D world. As a result, despite our initial hesitation with Unity, we're going to look into using it. A network of other groups using Unity has been set up, both through Tudocs and Google Wave, so we at least have a level of support to aid in our learning.

Anyway, other than that, spent the time gloating that Azusa beat Nagi 1516 votes to 1339. Chris had some choice words for me.

Week 3 - Yes We Nyan!

(I put a bet on at the end of last week: Azusa Nakano would win Anime Saimoe, with 3 rounds left to go. Betting in the quarter finals did receive some scorn, though with her progressing further since that bet (albeit with my side-bet of Shana beating Nodoka Haramura proving to be wrong; I have to now watch Saki), I still feel confident I could be victorious.)

This week has been rather coding heavy for Advanced Web Games with Alistair. Much of our time was spent trying to remove screen flicker from movement based on user input, which of course was caused by assorted people trying to help code and ended up causing conflicts. That's our story, mine and Jamie's, and we're sticking to it.

On the side of design, we assigned group roles this week as well as finalising the choice of platformer. We're beginning to veer towards a 2D game, though not finalised that just yet; it's more in consideration of the fact that our knowledge of Javascript is still rather low at this stage, so 2D would perhaps be easier to script, though with the drawback of restricted gameplay.

For our roles, with J being the project leader, Chris and I were placed in charge of design, with myself being the lead designer and Chris being the level designer. Euan and Jonny were put in charge of art, with Jonny being character concept artist and Euan being environmental concept artist for this phase. Suits me to a T, this one.

By Friday, Azusa is facing off with Nagi Sanzenin from Hayate the Combat Butler, so I could still be vindicated from the disbelief of Chris and Paul Bradley. We shall see ...

Week 2 - Subete wa Bekon to Yoideshou

Week 2 has been about bringing the group together and sharing ideas on the basics of the game: which genre was the first thing we discussed.

Looking to create an original IP, we did not have any particular concept going into the project, so decided to consider each of our interests in terms of genre. Discussing each of them in turn after creating a list, going over the pros and cons of making a game in each genre, a platformer appeared as a top preference for the group.

Of course, it was not an instant selection from that point. We decided at that point to go out and research various different types of platformer games; Sonic 4 had just been released, so this was my first port of call. While it was full of it's previous musical charm, I did find that the pacing of the game was very off at key points, so it did put me off creating a game based around a fast pacing.

Other games suggested for research included Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank and, the one I researched as I actually own the series, Spyro. Compared to Sonic, the obvious difference is the inclusion of 3D, which is another worry for another day: should be seek to go for 2D or 3D environments?

Spyro has been a game I enjoyed playing a fair bit in the past, so a game similar to it is one I definitely feel that I could get enthusiastic about creating. I also do start to feel like, compared to a 2D side-scroller, a more open, 3D world, would be a game that could lend itself to more unique ideas we could develop.

Having discussed some of our findings, we decide to do a bit more research into Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank and Spyro over the weekend; I'm looking for specific core gameplay and additional features such as collectables and the overall tone of the game to gauge a style for us to make.

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3^rd Year Games Dev. - Games ideas/Roles

Game Genres

• Chris: Survival horror, Stealth, Platformer

• Euan: Platformer, Puzzle, RPG

• Phil: Platformer, Fighting,

• Johnny: FPS, Platformer, 2D Game

• J: Platformer, RPG, Over the shoulder Shooter

Winning Genre: Platformer

Traits

Survival Horror - Design

Positive: Strong Atmosphere, Black Humour,

Negative: Hard to pull off, Difficulty in wide spread marketing, Repetitive, Lighting would have to be pulled off well, Music would have to be heavily atmospheric.

Stealth – Design

Positive: Not done too often could be viewed as a fresh take, could be fairly challenging, after figuring out AI the rest of the game would follow fairly easy,

Negative: AI would need to be heavily in-depth, will get repetitive, if not balanced well could turn out wrong,

Platformer – Design

Positive: Fairly large term a lot could be implemented and experimented with, could be done in both 2D and 3D rather well, a large markey still exists for the genre, once a single level is created it would be easy to create more of them, easily referencable, would be easier to pull off compared to other genres, easy to implement with the available dev tools,

Negative: A lot of games has been made in the genre causing it to have been a bit overdone, a viable story would be relatively hard to implement, difficulty may be hard to balance sometimes,

Puzzle – Design

Positive: Could be geared towards either a pick-up-and-play or story rpg games, if done well would be easily made addictive, length may not come up as a problem depending on the type of game, large market for the genre

Negative: Would be hard to come up with either unique, challenging or fun puzzles, a long development time may be needed to come up with good puzzles/justifiable story,

RPG – Design

Positive: Like platformer it's a fairly large genre, a large fanbase/market,depending on the type of RPG we can easily generate more content, if implemented well it can turn out great, a lot of roles available during development,

Negative: Overdone as of late, can get repetitive, the development time for an RPG can get fairly lengthy, a picky market/fanbase,

Fighting – Design

Positive: Fairly large market and fanbase, not a lot of innovation required during some aspects, if only an online vs game not a lot of AI would need to implemented, would be easily done as an adaption or geared towards a certain style,

Negative: If no AI was needed then a lot of networking would need to be done, could become repetitive, market could also be heavily competitive, no frame of reference for available games,

FPS – Design

Positive: A lot of different themes/times/areas could be easily implemented for an FPS, market for FPS is very large compared to every other genre, once AI is figured out the rest of the dev. Would be easy, tools that we could use are nearly all geared towards an FPS,

Negative: Overly done to hell, would be fairly hard to become distinguishable from the existing games, some physics and AI scripting may prove to be problematic,

Game Design Module - Week 1

Within the first day, I had joined a team consisting of myself, Jamie Boyle, Euan Smith and Chris Roberts, and Jonathan Callahan joined the following day. With the exception of Jonathan, we had worked together before on Kitsune, a games company which I co-own with a fellow student.

In the first week, we spent some time discussing the possibility of integrating previous resources existing from work in Kitsune, including input from other members of Kitsune, however we eventually realised that it would be best, due to Euan no longer working for Kitsune, and Jonathan having never, to start a new project with a clean slate.

We also decided on the genre of game to create and the environment to create it in. Unity, being a rather strong and popular development environment, we decided to create the game using it; it could also aid us in learning the Java module for Alistair McMonnies.