Brief/week 1
Brief
This week was the start our new assignment during this project we must use the games design document of someone else design and develop the game using the design documentation as inspiration.
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“Developing from the module Games Design, you will consider and vote for a Games Design Document that will be taken forward into Development as a “Vertical Slice”.
You will pitch and take on a specific role in the production of the “Vertical Slice”. The module operation is like a professional Games Studio, with staff taking on key roles as Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and Chief Operating Officer (COO) and students as creative leads in teams that engage in weekly sprints, using processes such as Agile and Kanban methodologies in a robust and industry approach utilising related tools.
You will assemble a portfolio of work that demonstrates your experimental process, the products of your testing and examples of work which creatively address the concerns and ambitions of the “Vertical Slice”.”
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Week 1
In the first session we looked at creating proposals for why our games should be voted for by the class for creation. Four of these games were chosen after the vote had commenced by the class as well as votes for who would lead each development team.
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Those games were:
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Glass gardens – Designed by Logan
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Onerio – Designed by Alex T
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On Thin Ice – Designed by Dylan
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Kyrat – Designed by Jake
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I portrayed that I had an interest in working on Kyrat due to its potential for 3D modelled miniatures and my intense and willingness to improve my 3D modelling and narrative creation skills.
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Idea Generation
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After we had our groups chosen, we then started talking amongst our groups and generated some ideas for a bored game based on jakes games design documentation due to James’s recommendation of steering away from video games.
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Role playing game (RPG)
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Plot?
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Stop people/individuals who seek to harm animals
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Free captured creatures
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Restore Environment
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Calm/tame creatures
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Balance the natural world with the human world
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Create a bond with a creature and gain its abilities
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Players can choose their abilities at start of the game (e.g., Star Wars RPG)
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Capturing, instead of just focusing purely on befriending (can have trials player needs to complete)
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Hybrid scientist (recollecting escaped/broken creatures)
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Breed creatures and keep track of new combinations they make
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Consider how far back the creatures can breed (How many generations)
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Take care of creatures
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Provide players the means to either befriend or kill creatures
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Solve environmental problems
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Players could create factions (creates possible competition)
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Ecology Board game
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Can make a rulebook/bestiary to accompany the game
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QR codes linking to 3D models that can be shown using AR technologies
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Areas can have certain creatures (presented as decks of cards)
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Symbols on cards
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Players will role dice with same symbols on and need to roll the corresponding symbol in order to obtain said creature.
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Can create a physical board and maybe pieces for more tactileness
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Cards will need to be dynamic (consider posing, scale, colour, composition)
Board design
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Following the talks, me and my group (project kryat) has about the design of the board for the game. We settled on the idea of having the board be a map of the area/world that the characters and these creatures reside in.
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I then looked at Jake (the designers) games design document and look at the environment design page that detailed the following areas for the world of the game these include a tundra, swamp, taiga and a fictional biome called prism tree. I took these as inspiration and used then and regions for the world/board designs.
The pictures presented on this page are some concept arts I did for the board design that I would like to have included in our game based on Jake's GDD. The black dots are spacing those players would move their characters too and how they will traverse the board, the red triangles represent the rarer animal encounters that can give players more points.
The mountains are a 3D piece that is place on the board, this and some tree models are designed to be physical objects in order to add some more depth top the world of Kryat and add more tactile game play.
