VERTICAL SLICE
This week was the beginning of the second semester of the year. We had been told over the Christmas/New Years break that we were going to do a project with the 2nd year Games Design students, and filled out a form where we highlighted what preferred roles we would like to do in this project. In the morning we received the project brief and were told what we were expected to do in this project, namely:
“This project expands on the skills, processes, planning and research from the first semester and looks to add more professional practices to your workflow, communications and reflective outlook. This assignment is intended to give an insight into a studios professional process from concept to development and final polish, with weekly feedback/critiques helping to refine these different stages.”
These were the tasks we were given for next week.
In the afternoon we met the members of our team. Us animation students started by introducing ourselves and showcasing some of our work to show our strengths, after we had all introduced ourselves and shown each other some of our work and talked a little about what we could be interested in doing, we did a team building exercise, and after started coming up with ideas for our project.
We established early on from conversations talking about our strengths and weaknesses that the game would have a mix of 2D and 3D assets. My role in the group as animator meant that if that was the case, I would be animating any characters or other things that needed it. I was actually very happy that I was going to be able to animate in 2D, as it’s what I want to specialise in and would love some work from this project to put into my portfolio. I also have a lot of interest in indie games that merge 2D and 3D aspects, such as Smile for Me and Subway Midnight, I was excited to try and contribute to something similar!
Before we came up with too many ideas, we had to figure out what type of game we wanted to make, mood wise. I was very interested in a psychological horror-esque game with goofy and absurd aspects thrown in. We ended up coming to terms as a group that we’d do a mystery/exploration horror game.
With a basic idea of mood, our ideas we came up with were able to be applied to that theme.
We also started brainstorming team names and game aspects such as collectables and gameplay ideas, but shortly after we started this, class ended. We scheduled a meeting for Wednesday to fill in the few people who weren’t in class on decisions and our concepts, and also to choose a final game concept and choose a narrative director.
We created a discord server for our team so we could talk to each other, and organised the server into channels for specific areas of the pipeline, to organise ourselves somewhat. Sophie also set up a shared Google Folder for our team so we could keep all of our files in one place where other members could access them if they need to.
During our Discord meeting on Wednesday, the people who weren’t in were filled in, and we started using the ideas channel to continue our brainstorming. When everyone had put in at least one idea, we used a simple voting system via reacting to the message to choose what narrative we wanted to go with in the game, mine won!
Sophie and Ethan were chosen as narrative directors, which was decided from using a spinning wheel website with all of the game design team members names on it, and with a story concept and narrative directors chosen – we created a miro board to compile images and continue to brainstorm. When the meeting was done I started to work on gathering images for inspiration.
Since we decided on 2.5D, I started to look at similar games such as Inside and Oxenfree I’d played before for aesthetic inspiration and to visualise what the game will play like. We wanted a monster incorporated at one point in our game, and since we decided on a mystery horror that takes place in a forest, we looked at monsters such as the one from the Ritual, though I’ll be looking at a few more monster designs to make something cool out of it.
In terms of other inspiration, I looked at games that utilise 2D and 3D that are psychological in nature, it helps that I love games like that! I looked at Smile for Me and Subway Midnight, as well as don’t starve. There’s also inspiration we can take from Yoshis Wooly World, Paper Mario and Little Big Planet.
I wanted to take on some concept art, and want to do a bit more before we decide on a character design. We were talking about being a detective unravelling a mystery throughout the game so I looked at traditional detectives and what they look like – the large beige and brown coats, the hat and the magnifying glass. I didn’t want to make our character too much of a stereotypical detective however, so I’m thinking of taking out some aspects, adding some different ones, and choosing a non-traditional colour scheme, since the neutral colours I’d worry would blend into the environment too well, we’ll see though.
There’s also some thing’s about the stereotypical detective I’d like to change. When you think of detective you think experienced, grizzled man with a long coat and 5 O’ clock shadow, but I wanted to perhaps put a spin on it and have a detective who is maybe on their first case, or perhaps a private investigator — or a person who decided to take matters into their own hands and figure out what happened by themselves.
This is probably not the final outcome by any means, but I wanted to get a placeholder design down as Sophie needed a very simple walk cycle to put into the blockout of how the game would play. I got that done and sent it over for her to use.
