End of pre-production

Hand in deadline is tomorrow, so this'll be my last post until we start again. I haven't posted in a while due to chrimbo hours at work are just exhausting me. 

The pictures above are emblems for upgrades that we used in the pitch document which should now be complete :) 

It looks really good thanks to will for putting it together and it's a bad ass document thanks to us both! I feel like design wise we've done well in pre-production and I'm pretty chuffed with the art too. 

Anyway, merry Christmas to y'all! 

Loading... Loading...

So I to catch up on the events recently!

I have been working on getting some animations ready of the asteroids blowing up into little pieces and fading out, so that when we start testing out the game more, it'll allow us to have a nicer visual representation and it'll help educate me on animating!

I have done one before which I have shown on the blog but it was out of place at times and just poor quality so I've done 4 others which are 100 by 100 pixels a frame and 11 frames long.

Already you may find the explosions are diffrent so a few modifications need to be made but over all they'll need polishing up a lot later in the game cycle! 

In the design aspect of this stage, Will is putting our stuff together in a nicely presented Pitch document which as I just said  is turning out really nice! So we are in a pretty comfortable position at the moment both design and in art. 

Sprite Sheets

So I'm putting sprite sheets into practice now since we're making/experimenting with animating in unity 2D! I've learnt a good bit about it already, after doing my initial one I found out I need to use a bigger sprite sheet in Photoshop to make more room for the animation and I also preferably want more than 10 frames.

That's the 10 frame one ^^ 

Now I'm working one one with 15 frames and twice the height and a quarter the length... problem being now I cannot save them as a PNG! 

So I'll need to talk through my options with team mates on Thursday!

Remake

This was what I first began with... attempting to create a spaceship for our game... Shit right? Yes!

But not too long after making many backgrounds and getting more used to photoshop and finding cool new ways to do things I managed to create this one below. And I was happy with this... thinking Yippi I can finally do shit! 

I think a lesson after I managed to create a spaceship similar to this one below (but not quite this one) and I was even more delighted! The progression between them all is a lot since I am not comfortable with art! 

All in all here I am glad with my accomplishment and it's kinda edging me towards being a bit more artistic (only a little). The cool design phase for this is that I've written a background for all of the space craft we have which should be in the pitch document! 

I think it's going to be cool to pick on of these ships and make it your own! The next step for me is too create the visuals for the upgrades to go on these ships. Should be fun!  

Scorpion M4900

Scorpion M4900

The Scorpion spacecraft is a typical mining ship but due to its ability to withstand impact from debris it became very popular with the civilian population and thus the Scorpion M class was created. The 4900 model comes with a slightly more reinforced hull and has the potential to hold a lot more fuel than most spacecraft, also included are platforms for additional upgrades so you can go all out of this beaut! A bit more expensive than the others but when it comes to your life; you can never be too safe.

Upgrades:

Fuel Capacity – Level 1-14

(Before every level they player must draw a path and the length of the path is determined by how much fuel the ship can carry. The fuel capacity can be upgraded in-between levels which can allow for longer paths to be created which will increase the difficulty and give added bonuses!)

Hull strength – Level 1-12

(The hull strength is how much damage you can take before your ship is destroyed; the higher the level it is the more damage you can afford to take.)

Engine Power level 1-7

(Engine power is all about speed, some ships are more designed to speed away where as others need upgrades to even compare to others. Upgrading the engine will mean the ship will complete its journey faster hopefully avoiding more incoming asteroids.)

Add-ons:

Force Shield – Level 1-3

(Even the greatest Captains make mistakes like letting an asteroid hit them… or two… but with this nifty little gadget you need not worry they will bounce right off the shield protecting your ship from perilous death!! *customer warning: shield will only last a few impacts*)

Laser Guns – Level 1-3

(ATEROIDS, ASTEROIDS EVERYWHERE!! No matter, just activate your laser guns!? Don’t have them? Well you are missing out, these top of the line assault weapons will blow those pesky rocks into even smaller rocks rendering them useless and all that from the click of a button! *customer warning: multiple use only, batteries must be recharged after every journey*)

Shockwave – Level 1-3

(Oh no… They’re everywhere! Who can save us?! Well it’s not who can save us, it is “what” can save us! This cool piece of tech was developed to protect the mining crafts during asteroid showers. Anything within the radius will be blown away when you activate the shockwave! Protecting you from any and all dangers! *customer warning: multiple uses only, needs a long…ish… time until it can be used again.*)

Lesson Learnt!

Today I learn the valuable lesson of saving my fucking work before photoshop fucks me in the arse. So yeah. pretty much just that.

Spaceship number 2 please...

So here is one the the spacecraft that the player can choose from. It's called the Serenity 9000. A quick nimble transport ship but doesn't have that great a hull strength!

Showcase

Finished the art for all the asteroids a while back but just posting them before I forget! Whipped them all together too... As you can see they all follow our "geometric twist" of an art style which I feel looks really cool actually. I'll post more on the pitch document later that I have done and some of the space craft and hopefully some upgrades!! 

Art/Design Advancements

Lets start off with Design eh?

So just moving onto the pitch Document now, thought I'd give it a bit of TLC so I wrote a little on the game overview side:

Hexicronic is a strategy/action game where you have to draw a path for a spaceship through many different locations in space in search for unimaginable fortune in the form of a “Hexicronic”. To make things challenging, while navigating through the space asteroids will be flying at the player in which they have to defend against using their reflexes and quick thinking. Asteroids will fly in on the screen randomly some with different mechanics so it doesn’t get so repetitive and can indefinitely increase the difficulty level as the player attempts to keep their spaceship in once piece through the levels.

In the search of the “Hexicronic” you buy the cheapest ship you can find with all the money you own. Now you must travel across the vast space which is the universe, upgrading your ship as you go along with money you salvage along your journey. To do that, a path must be navigated to avoid death and scavenge valuables in the attempt to find the “Hexicronic” to ultimately gain untold riches! 

As I said just a little bit to describe the game, since it is more on a pick up and play game for Androids and such I thought against writing my usual essays of back story. 

I have also written on the mechanics of "Path drawing" and "Asteroids" so I need to get some art to accompany them to make sure it all looks dandy!! 

A problem I've en counted with design - art limitations is that I'm unable to draw up a spaceship the looks visually pleasing and I'd really want more than one spacecraft available to the player, I feel having multiple options in an app is a real repayable factor in these sort of games as I have found out the hard way a lot of wasted time later! Ideally I want 3 different space crafts with each different strengths and weaknesses like one more agile, one more durable and another maybe in between the both. This I feel would give the player a satisfying sense of picking "their" own spaceship rather than being handed one and then getting the luxury of still getting them both eventually, this can always lead to future updates with more space crafts more ideas which can make the game easily playable many a time just to get all the upgrades/spaceships or even new backgrounds. 

My inspiration from these ideas are a mixture, a bit from a game called "Hill Climb" some from "Pokemon" and then also from these images I found: 

Obviously I have to minimise my thoughts here since I'm talking post release but I am trying to prioritise the idea of making this repayable since it is the core strength of a game like this, I feel if it's only entertaining on the one play through then we'll have done something wrong. 

So... Now art! 

I have set out to create some cool backgrounds for our game, given we're going for a geometric look this is what I have made: 

I have made a lot of these quite dark mainly because I was mainly thinking they'd be subtle background images that you could only just make out while defending your ship but the grey scale in the middle is a favourite at the moment so I'm going to go ahead and try to make more similar to that. 

My biggest challenge is creating the space craft... which I'm going to have to work on... ALOT! 

Design Advancements

Over the past few weeks we were dancing around the idea called "escaping rygon 5" which sounded pretty cool. It starts in a prison which the player has escaped and then they have to find parts to build their spaceship, so they can eventually escape the solar system. 

Now after a lot of discussing we've come to an idea where the player can create apath through space and must get from one side of the screen to the other. Now once the path has been created their spaceship will follow it no matter what, while this happens asteroids will come at the spaceship which the player then has to flick away. With all of this there will be a shop to upgrade the ship and buy boosts ect... 

In the mean time I came up with some diffrent asteroids that could play a part in the game: 

Basic ball – Stays still but player can throw it.

Basicv2 ball – Moves on the screen and the player can move it.

Solid ball – Asteroid cannot be moved by the player but can be moved by other asteroids

Solidv2 ball – Asteroid moves but player cannot interact with it, course can be changed by other objects though. 

Fire Ball – Quick speed asteroids which the player can fling away, objects that get hit by this ball speed up slightly. 

Molten Ball – Travels at normal speed but when it interacts with an object it explodes both itself and the object it 

collided with creating small shrapnel. 

Ice ball – Travels at slow speed, when it collides with another object it slows that object down. Once an object has been hit by the ice asteroid it can then be destroyed by throwing a basic asteroid at it. 

Black hole – Gradually sucks all objects around it in. 

NINJA BALL – small, fast asteroids that deal small damage but are hard to catch. 

Gold ball – A rare asteroid that can be broken open with a basic asteroid, which in turn gives the player money

The Growth of My Art...

So I'm attempting to become more artistic this year so I'm starting simple. I've made a lot of terrible art and some okay, it helps that we've gone for a geometric art style meaning my inability to do art as a whole is much less of a problem.

This was me attempting different art styles before the geometric decision and even though I know this is crappy I did feel happy about it and got a nice sense of accomplishment. 

After looking at the images that we wanted our game to look like I tried to follow the same direction. 

This being the mood board with all the lovely pictures, all above my skill cap. 

These are my attempts at art but my team members gave them some good reviews so I'm quite happy with them.  

Attempting art

So I'm trying to dabble in a bit of art so I can understand it and maybe even do it. I have created a bit of concept art which SUCKS but the background turned out okay I think.

The problem is making the planets look... well... good. It looks too terrible. The blue line in the background was also a mistake which I couldn't undo so I had to make the best of it with lots of layer editing >.<

Thinking...

Onto another week developing the idea of our game and I've spent some time thinking about what gets me to keep playing an app I play on my phone. 

Using my real life experience with addictive games I mainly pin it down to having to collect enough money/points to unlock cool or ridiculous advantages or visual aesthetics! With this I suggested we implement a money system to allow the play to keep saving for upgrades and the continuation on playing. Using mini games to acquire the coins the player will have several different places to find these games, some of which will be very difficult while others easy with less reward.  

It's an obvious and simple idea but I feel it should fit well into the game. 

Another idea I liked is placing the player in a solar system rather than just a planet. Each planet will have a mini game to collect coins with (same mini game just more difficult ect) and each planet will have a shop with upgrades to your ship. This will make the playing field look much bigger and suggest that there are more options but the problem comes when we need it to not look shit... and space is cool... so we have to make it look simple but good at the same time! 

This is just the doodles that I used to get some of the ideas while I draw a story for myself so I can immerse my self within. 

The Final Stretch... Kind of.

Towards the end of last year I had felt beaten by a lot of the pressure and stress so it felt good to have a long 1 month off uni. 

Now back at uni, much has changed. 

We have a new room and have lost two tutors, James and Ben who were both really great people and teachers and it really sucks to not have them this year. It was especially nice to keep getting updates of Ether every lesson with them and I wasn't too happy with this turn of events. On top of that I felt the whole "choose your own group" was irritating but what can you do eh. 

We had our first "Production" lesson tonight with our new tutor Peter who seems really enthusiastic and just a really nice guy overall. 

I am also looking forward to next production lesson since Peter said he would try to give us a Q&A testing lesson to help us prepare for the industry and to just help give us some knowledge about it! :) 

Anyway... back to today... 

I'm part of the "The Cloudy Lime" Group:

Darren: Programmer

Will: Programmer/Designer

Me/Max: Designer

We have a game concept called "Escape from Rygon 5" which is about a person whom is wrongfully accused and placed in a maximum security prison in space, with the objective to escape. The way of escape is by collecting parts for your spaceship off several planets near by and when attempting to collect these parts or travelling to the planets there will be little puzzle mini-games to entertain the player. 

The Game is to be made for Android and seems to be are solid concept so far. 

That's about it for now anyway... Till next time!

The End.

Here it is. The End.

Hand in has been done. In the end David did work very hard with programming, textures ect and got the level looking pretty. Unfortunately just before we burned the game onto the disk... our matches stopped working so the game is literally unplayable. That sucks. But it's more than I expected to have.

This project was half a failure because we fucked up. The successful half is that we can learn from this.

Work HARDER is the biggest thing here... earlier on in the year there wasn't enough work being done for design or art. No matter the case we could have gotten more done but I think a lot of people are still in the student mind set and un-motivated. The lack of art through out the entire project was abysmal but this is a learning year so hopefully that won't happen again and I know I'll improve on my following up and even assisting art.

I will keep saying this that I am also at fault, I am no way near perfect and I slacked off too through out this project, by just being lazy and that's not happening again.

For hand in though I made this which was pretty cool:

 The hand in case looks really cool! ready for the shelf in stores... just without the game.

I have been very negative through out this post but I must commend people too. David was really good in the last few weeks and did a lot of work and it wouldn't have looks as good as it did without him. Its a real shame it can't be played because it was quite fun to play and he did an excellent job taking over for Darren.

A title with meaning.

So I'm just out of breath now, I'm as unmotivated as I've ever felt on this course because we're so late in and we don't have a level. Not one level. It's been on going like this for so long and it devastates me that I find it so hard to care for my own project.

To go from having this image in my mind of the game and I know it was never going to look the same but I expected something to look at. Everything has taken far too long for the art. The character, the level, the textures and it's just worn me down. I have tried chasing these up and motivating and demanding and requesting and speaking about it and saying "it's not good enough" and here we are. With no level. I honestly hate this.

All I can do now is convince my self not to stress because I know we are not going to be able to hand anything worthy in. It's going to be worthless because of my bad planning and a horrific progression of work although I fully exclude Darren in this since he's been the hardest worker and very professional with getting it done and managing to enjoy life too :)

It just saddens me to finish below my already low expectations.

Mission Impossible?

So deadline even nearer now and I know we are not going to hit it at all... alls to do now I feel is to try and get the best out of what we got and try to get as much done! The other thing to do is look back on how I can improve, as the team leader I have made errors, many of them and I need to learn from them if i'm to lead again next year. 

1. I need to be more confident and assertive - I feel that I needed to be that guy who meithers everyone for work and keeps bugging people just so we hit the deadlines and milestones. I need to follow up and motivate people to get work done. 

2. I need to do more work my self - I need to set the example and I have been messing about with design for too long, it should have been done years ago. I need to help other little jobs like doing more textures and maybe even learning 3ds max to do some modelling. 

3. I need to stick to my plan - At the start of the project I had such a perfect layout for design and art and when the vertical slice arose I postponed so many tasks when we should have worked through them and just worked harder. I feel that I have clumped all the tasks at the end and this is my wrong doing for that. 

On another note though... 

BAM... cool texture... 

Limbo

So we arn't really moving anywhere at the moment. We're stalled on the art and programming is having to be done within the vertical slice but it is still advancing and the code is getting better and better :) I'll have to start doing some textures to help out but I'm not too good!

In the mean time we're just getting closer and closer to the deadline which is pretty worrying...

I made a kinda shitty texture to begin with, even though it isn't great I still feel a bit proud.

Moving on

Now past the vertical slice we are heading onto the next milestones ahead of us, one of which is the Alpha presentation. We have been told that it's not a strick hand in we just need to show how far we've gotton with the game and what work has been done ect...

It feels good to have finnaly have a texture in our game even though it's distorted, which we have to find a way to fix!

now we need to get the levels designed and built and then programmed... ONLY.

Vertical Slice / Update

We had a milestone upcoming which was called the vertical slice which is where we have a slice of our game that is meant to really put across our idea and the feel of gameplay. 

For once... we did well!! The feel of the game with the new stats for jumping went down really well, LADDERS WORK. So many little but really significant buggs were fixed thanks to our glorious programmer Darren. David really helped out with the programming as well and did well with design too!! 

A texture was finally made for it as well... last second which was better than ever before. Although visually this is the best we've ever achieved it still isn't good enough. The texture our Arstist did was awesome! I loved it but I need to keep asking for things which is difficult for deadlines ect. 

But we got a great response from out tutor Ben and I feel for once we were pretty much on top for where out game is with that presentation at least... we have a long way to go still. 

Now we just need to build the game. 

Rezzed

Rezzed!! It was pretty damn awesome... My first game expo I have been too and I got to play my beloved Total War: Rome II and I experienced virtual reality on my tutors game Ether One. It was really something to see so many indie games being shown off under one roof and also some less indie games... 

This was a long awaited thing, and I thoroughly enjoyed playing the game. Unfortunately we could only play one battle but you could pick either Rome or Egypt of which I tried both. Rome was the more challenging of the two and I just left my navy to die after forgetting about them but out played the defending Egyptians on land so I won the battle anyway. Then playing as Egypt I felt like the game played me... I couldn't set my army out in a formation I was comfortable with so I got a displeasing set up and then to top it off spent half the battle trying to figure out how to deploy these really cool fire ball things and by the time I had figured it out, the Romans were engaging me. Least to say I thought "Well shit." but alas even out positioned because I was trying to figure shit out they were losing and I had nothing tactically to do... I was just winning from the word go. This wasn't satisfying as I was not earning this victory and it felt like I'd just pushed an old guy down the stairs. I couldn't feel proud of this victory. I can just hope that was on easy battle difficulty. 

Then I played the Ocolus Rift (VIRTUAL REALITY SHIT) and it was incredibly. The game is my tutors game which I am personally excited for but as a device this was one of the coolest things I have experienced.  It helped that the environment was stunning as I was walking through trees, looking down a cliff and across a town but to be inside of a game was incredible!! I can only wait for what the future holds for this stuff because it's heading in the perfect direction. 

After an awesome day we went to rest our heads at a hotel we booked... 

Least to say... we checked in for an hour and then left to stay somewhere else... All in all a great weekend! 

Tasks

So we have had a lesson with "an hour of fun" from our tutor which is where we all just play each others games for constructive crit.

It has been really interesting to hear new ideas and problems they encountered although most of them we already knew of and were very obvious. Now we need to solidify our controls and make the game playable, take a new approach and just get a small textured level with a working player controller.

This is the direction we're heading in now and I need to manage to get my artist to texture which will be a challenge.

Its getting tiresome and frustrating being responsible for people not hitting deadlines and such and being unable to get some to do work.

PLANNING!

Planning... 

Spent a lot of time managing our schedules (estimated) on clockingit but it is really giving me a sense of direction for our project! We will be making a level per week and the art hopefully the week after for that level created but we'll have to see how much time what consumes.

I do not know much about how long any of the programming takes which means I need the wonderful Darren to take care of opening and closing his tasks and setting his date markers. This should help me get a better grasp in the future so I can get a good insight into programming schedules and time estimates on tasks. 

In terms of managing I was hoping I could get people to write a blog every Friday but alas it seems to be a task difficult to motivate. Had the most success the first Friday but now it's going down and I just worry about if I am not showing good enough leadership qualities and I don't want to have to bitch and moan about such a small task in others eyes. 

Holiday!!

As far as holidays go, this is pretty much the only one I feel we'll get since it's the week after hand in so all we had to sort out was planning stuff. This means that we can relax! yeah! Obviously not much has gone down, but I do plan to get some level design done tomorrow so I can be ahead of the curve if you will.

But no matter how long the break it never feels enough for me and Uni work starts Monday properly as much as I love it, I am also dreading the worry of doing enough work.

The Rise To Power!

It's been... too long me thinks. So over the time I have forgotten to write my blog, much has happened obviously.

For starters I got voted into power by my group...

Nothing can go wrong here...

We did a lot better for this hand in compared to the last one. Got all our work done early, to a high standard.  Our prototype level was awesome even with bugs in it I could really see how much it had advanced.

The GDD was actually fun to put together and write as 5,500 words came together, it felt very satisfying to finish it!!

Previous to the hand in, all I was doing was procrastinating and attempting to write more in depth for all sections in the doc. At first it was a challenge but once I got going it felt easier and easier to write.

I feel our team is a lot more organised than before but I still feel we could do much better in terms of how much work we can produce.

I am kinda obligated now to do my blog every friday since I am the group leader I have to almost set an example, I can't just go... "you guys, do work." while relaxing in my chair. Or could I?

LevelDesign

In the process of completing our prototype 2 level which I am going to be really impressed to see. It's a lot bigger than our last one so hopefully we'll get a better feel for the game with this one. Got a bunch of free time from work now as well which means more uni work can be done! I also know more about the GDD now so I can start on that at some point once I get these levels out the way. 

So until next friday... 

Not a lot has happened since uni on Wednesday since I have been in work almost all the time and I am feeling fatigued so sleep has been using my time after work.

I did get a chance to look at some game user interfaces to help give me ideas for ours or useful suggestions.

I am committing to writing this blogg especially since we have set up notifications now on clockingit. Feels like things are a lot more organised now.

What now...

Pre Production phase 2 has begun!!

And I am not too sure where to go now... The GDD is an obstacle that I have never encountered and when looking at templates for them it turns out some of what they say might be good and some useless. Which mean I have to wait to know how to write one and I was really hoping for a head start so I could get working on this ASAP and I just can't do that mentally when I am walking in the dark.

Reaserch has been all of my tasks so far and I feel like it is time wasted. I am not doing anything other than looking at what other people have done when I could be getting started on this mountain of a document (In comparison to any I have writen before). I am stressing a lot over this because I feel useless just "reaserching".

There is still a new level to design for Prototype 2.0 so that'll be getting done soon.

Good news is that our team has encorperated a new method to keep track on our wrok where every Monday, Tuesday and Friday we write down what we think we'll achive for our next meeting and then if we have done our target. This will hopefully prevent late work, it'll help us see if anyone needs help or pushing to work.

Natural Disaster or Man Made?

Okay so pretty appauling finish. Just terrible. From being so possotive about everything I begin to hate the world again.

I thought everything was finished and done which was my mistake for not checking up and seeing if anything needed being done. Clearly this was not the case as we were so unprepared working on the pitch document up unil the final minute and then that needed printing and binding so late to presentation class. Great.

For the design aspect of this group we failed that day, "battle of de som" failed.

That being said it couldn't have got worse. But it did.

The actual presentation was a state, again ill-prepared, sloppy and I could have been a lot convincing if I had the time to prepare which will be made next time.

There was not a good point about that presentation, from poor presenting to being talked over by my own team members and being contradiced during the presentation embarresing us further. This showed that as a group we ****ed up. Anything we do diffrently next time will be an improvement but I will make sure this never happens again along side other team members with the same attitude! We are going to nail the next one, by making a plan for out presentation so we look like a team and not a group of kids introducing our selfs for the first time. We will meet up days earlyer and finish our work and have it so we can't do anything on the last day because we have nothing to do.

So putting that behind us. The show must go on.

Incoming!

Deadline not far away now which means putting the peddal to the metal and getting all my work done and to look very beautiful! I look forward to presenting our work as it has been going well, we all seem to be pulling our weight and all of us want to!

I am taking over the enviroments task for the Pitch Doc because we need the art to be done and I have the time to get this done lowering poor Harrys work load which is quite a lot. He has got some great concepts being drawn up that are looking amazing and I think this art style is perfect for the game!

Still working my way around the stupid project plan and the template the lies!!!! I am confusing my self by attemping to equal my work in accordance to this template: I have been told to not think too much about it which proves more difficult than imagined.

All in all not a lot of work to be done, pretty relaxed on that front!

Progress v2.0

As time has flown by so has work. I have blitzed through my pitch document text and finished polishing it up the other day with the help of my friend in Denmark who checked over my grammar and made sure he could understand what my text was saying.

As a group we seem to be advancing quite well, although slightly worried about art I understand it can't be the most enjoyable thing to do and Harry has promised it'll be in on time so it all looks good!

We're going through who is doing what again as dead line is closing in and the "project plan" is now being encountered. It looks strange, I am sure the text will be easy but I always think too much about how to make it perfect and the template doesn't look right considering I am to write 500 words approx and the document contains 1,700 words!!

David made some great background page designs for the pitch document and has volinteered to put the document together which is cool, means I can get working on some other things and not have to worry so much about the pitch document getting finished. Just the enviroments need writing up for it  now I think.

                                                        (The cool background!!!)

The prototype is definatly looking cool... besides some not so amazing graphics it is really nifty what is being programmed and Darren seems to be loving it all. (sarcasm) It looks very painful from what I can gather from his body language and extencive violent language.

Breif Level design

Durin the few days of Uni we attended we had some productive talks on what we're going to do, how we're going to go about things! I am excited to see how this prototype Darren is going create will turn out especially as we have a level for the prototype.


The level it'self isn't that great, I mainly wanted to focus on getting all our mechanics we have into a small quick level purely so it could be done fast and displayed easily for people to see. You will see here that my photoshop skills (not paint... don't be fooled) are not that great, But I have made this from just a scribble on paper to a perfectly scaled image.






I posted this in our facebook group ready for slander and other hurtful things but it was welcomed by darren who is whipping it up soon!

There was also a key for this but facebook has lost it...

Idle

The story seems to be the main time killer for me right now and although it really really is not taking up a lot of time in comparison to the work I have set out for me with this document: It will be the more difficult task. I have been quite busy with actual work that pays money so getting time to work on these things has been a slight effort when I have to balance it with some useless procrastination and painfully relaxing games.

My biggest challenge so far is taring my self away from my PC... to stop playing Shogun 2 but everytime I battle my self in an attempt to withdraw from games I keep saying the deadly words. Just one more!!

But I have won a good few times and in thoes times I have gotton through my work very quickly and spending a good hour making sure it's good enough, it seems I spend more time making sure I like what has been written than actually writing it.

Pitch Document...

Here begins what I feel will be the most work out of things so far, be that so I still think it'll be really cool to advertise a game we're actually going to create!

For now we just browse and plan on stuff to write, thinking of how it'll be presented and such as it won't be done in a day...

Me and David will be splitting this into two halfs to make the work load more relaxed and so that we can both contribute to the document. Even Harry will be getting involved by writing up the enviroments.

I'm going to be working on the Story, background, platform, genre as of now which are some really fun things to work on. What I find may be hard for once is writing a story due to the fact it isn't heavily story based so I feel it may be quite short or may just take a while for me to come up with something I am happy with.

Lucid

A welcoming first assignment into our game development project is the concept document which has been split between me and David, our company's main designers. I have already enjoyed working on the few documents and idea concepts we have begun! It is nice having this feeling of motivation for once encouraging me to finish work to a high standard.

Our idea is very exciting, especially as we have all contributed to this hopefully creating a desire in us all for this be amazing! The art style sounds appealing to me, we're going for a morbid water paint/crayon look.

                                                                  (maybe like this...)

Overall I am very much enjoying my group and our idea, I can't wait to get working on the future assignments and eventually the finish of our game!

Stalemate Studios

So here we are, at the point of the course I have been looking forward to since day one. We have been put into groups to create a game of our very own! I am very excited as it is obvious and I am already writing my concepts down ready to put my all into this, the idea of what I can have and what could potentially be waiting for me in the future...

In our first lesson we were given the task to come up with a name for our company for the group we have been put in, which is a great group of people may I add. Stalemate studios was the outcome of that which I feel is pretty cool.

It is incredibly different working for a group than for myself, it gives me motivation and the last thing I'd want to do is let any of them down so I can pretty much put my all into it and most of all I want to.

To think that this game will be made by me and my friends I have made at Uni/Collage is a crazy thought for I have only ever played games. I need to focus on not setting too big a challenge for anything that may come ahead, keep things realistic and focus on getting it done to the highest standard possible.