The Vertical Slice project: We started off with introductions and getting to know each other. As I joined the course straight into second year I didn’t know a lot of my class so it was good to learn everyone’s names and it was good to meet the Games Design students we would be working closely with

As I was mainly focused on rigging and animation they were my top priority but I let my team know I would also be there for modelling/animation support and asset creation.

While I did offer my support I also offered to take a sort of lead role to help most of the team with anything present in their models that could cause issues for my animation and rigging. this took the form mainly in advising Manny about changes to the base model and stylistic changes for Jack to think about etc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After introductions we were further divided up into small groups of 3-4 to begin brainstorming ideas of what to make our game about.
The Yellow highlights are ideas that I specifically prompted as ideas but the green highlight is the idea we agreed upon to pitch to the rest of our team.

 

 

 

 

Each of the three teams explained their ideas and we were torn between the detective and the little nightmares style platformer games.

 

We got to work pitching the rough idea to the lecturers then gathered in a discord group made by Manny to allow more concentrated and organised discussion of the ideas. (We ran with the working title of “Little Nightmares Style Game” for 2 weeks)

We began discussing our roles and what they meant with Manny and Jack working on main protagonist and antagonist respectively then me Orna and Harry working on asset creation and creatures etc. Then we made headway into the Miro board each selecting a section to develop our work:

I decided because my main tasks were more heavily focused on later sections within development I would design a logo/title for the game that we could also use as a Discord icon. I looked into all the games I could find that featured size imbalance within the main character and what way their fonts were created to try and design something catchy and visually fit our theme. I workshopped the title as a play on words as the term “Measley” was a play on the small size of the character and “Feat” referring to the journey of finding their partner again. The use of purple and blue in my opinion gave of a 80s feel which is the rough time our game was set etc. (Although this title was subject to change at this point).

We discussed during our first meeting (planned to do a meeting every Wednesday for the remainder of the project) that the game level would consist of a large warehouse section in which the main goal was the main character avoiding the aliens cone of vision as they made it to the other side. During this meeting we covered many of the most basic ideas including the types of animation we were going to need and what types of rigs this would need then how many characters style and art inspiration.