This whole project started with LM121 waltzing into the lecture hall on Monday ready for our first lecture with Gavin Wade for Game Modelling Design.
Gavin told us about the group project we would have to submit by April 23rd at 3pm that would be 100% of our grade.
This group project would naturally be a game (hence module title),
whether it would be a full or demo of the game would depend on the complexity of the game concept chosen.
Nevermind the game concept, my first mission would be finding a group.
Gavin told us that groups of 6-8 people would be ideal and while he could be persuaded for larger groups, 6 was a strict minimum.
Time to strategize!
It was easy to find the first 4 people, all I had to do was look around the lecture hall and catch some of my friends' eyes, a small nod and a silent deal was struck. The rest however would require a little thinking.
After the lecture we met up in one person's accommodation as our unofficial first meeting and discussed who would be good additions for the group. I messaged some other students, I knew had good work ethics and were more experienced in coding since that seemed to be the weakness of our current group.
Unfortunately, those friends had already found groups of their own. However, we managed to successfully invite 3 more members that myself and another had worked with before and could vouch for their work ethic and social skills.
We wanted to have 8 people to have the most hands on deck, and luckily we managed to get the eighth person through one of the other members who vouched for her and was friends with her.
Our final group: Muireann Egan, kiki , Deeva, Riyaam, Amy, Vidhisha, Diana.
In our unofficial meeting we also discussed ideas and concepts as well as roles. We bounced around from horror, suspenseful games, (think Chillas Art) and different story themes we could have.
The one thing we all agreed on was a game with a story and that was visually appealing. Despite this game being for a Computer Science module, we decided art was quite important as between myself and Amy we had a lot of artistic opportunities. I was both excited and intimidated as I’m aware that Amy has a much more detailed style than I do, not to mention we use different programs and devices for our artwork. Muireann suggests doing a pixel style so that the art style difference won’t be as noticeable and it would have a nice feel to it, so we decided to think about it.
Back to game concepts, we brought up other games as points of reference to explain the game mechanics in our mind’s eye. I suggested a game like “Slay the princess” where the game has multiple endings based on your choices. It was decided it was too simple of a concept but a good idea. We also discussed the idea of an unreliable narrator, similar to “The Stanley Parable”.
However all of this was spewing random things that we each liked and since we didn't have all our members yet (at the time of this meeting), getting members was the priority with mulling over ideas as second.
Honestly, I feel that we have accomplished a lot in one week, we just about got our group together, and have the beginnings of a game concept. Logically we have to be careful of feature creep and being way in over our head this game needs to come together in a matter of months, but I believe our group is a good group with two artists (Amy and I) and Muireann as our producer, not to mention a plethora of coders. Our deadline is April 23rd at 3pm and no later, not to mention these development diaries are being graded as well.
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