After being briefed on the assignment we broke into groups with the game design students, in my group was, Animation- Alyssa (me), Asia, Scott, and Cor. and in games was Issac, Jordan, and Oisin. Asia wasn’t in on the first day. we talked about ideas, then broke into smaller groups and did idea generation.
the first idea we settled on was an idea Jordan and I came up with called giving too much, its about a little rock statue who slowly gives parts of themselves to other people but eventually gives too much. the teachers liked the idea but told us to edit it. we decided to move it to a bit less of a story telling game and instead just have a running narrative, I came up with the name Pebbles Pursuit for our game. where now you are a little rock statue and the goal of the game is to make it to the end to stop a volcano from erupting by throwing yourself in. in a self sacrificing way. later we did a discord call with Asia to discuss our plans and ask for their input.
I came up with this rough up of a level design idea. as i am working on backgrounds and assets, along with Cor. everyone seemed to like it so we continued with this idea. Cor came up with the ide of having the village be comprised of cold colours and then the level gradually get warmer as we get closer to the end.
The direction we wanted to go in for the art style was lineless detailed backgrounds, as well as lineless characters. So we decided to look into the “Saturday morning” cartoony style for our game. Rayman legends was a game we really liked the look of as well as Roki. because they have very simple character designs with really beautiful backgrounds that have really good use of lighting and detail.
Scott wanted to use Swedish folk attire for the character designs as they involved bright colours and a lot to the people looked very friendly. So i looked into Swedish villages as inspiration for the Village at the start of the game as I am in charge of designing that.
I also started to design a layout and figure out why the villagers had to send Pebbles to close the volcano instead of just a person from the village. I though it would be a cool design if the village was up on a cliff and the rock statue can use these floating rock islands to get the the volcano quicker where as the villagers have to travel down the mountain which takes much longer. so the reason they would have to send pebbles is because he can take a short cut where as they would have to take the long way and wouldn’t make it to the volcano in time to stop it.
I had started roughing out a layout to get the idea across where the village centers around the shaman, and there is a stairway along the cliff that leads to different levels that would be used for things like farming. However, at second round of feedback the teachers didn’t understand why we where basing it on Sweden since there is no volcanos. They also suggested that we simplify the game play. So we switched to Iceland. So now I research Iceland architecture.
The pictures I found where very pretty and i found some images that I thought would be good for the game with examples of architecture as well as the landscape, but I also wanted to bring some almost Viking influence to make it feel older.
The reason I wanted to do this is because the fact they are sending pebbles away to die shows they are a little bit stuck in the past, and I thought a good way to hint at this is to have some older style buildings.
I did a rough mock up of what the village will look like however as this was a quick mock up to gauge the architectural style then I went to making it closer to the final product.
I then made my art style guide.
I suggested to my group that because we are doing multiple levels we could switch the colour temperature, so it starts cold at the village when they are happy to send pebbles off but in the later levels when they aren’t so sure about sending pebbles to the volcano, it get warmer. everyone seemed to like this idea so as of right now we are going with it.
we then worked on the slides with Asia and I doing 2 slides each and Cor and Scott doing 1 each. Scott has been sick so they haven’t been to involved in the group chats. Asia maybe just didn’t see my message but they filled in the slide that was meant to be Scotts? so now i am not sure what Scott is going to make a slide on.