Introversion !

Really cool day to the end of a pretty painful week. Work has continued steadily even though we were working kind of in the dark for the most of it. The problem, is it turned out was neither scale or being too ambitious. Its just we figured that since we had a hell of a lot to do content creation wise we'd better get cracking on with it. After our 6th or so chat with an EA official the message finally sunk in that we should focus on a teeny part of the island and get that feature complete, and then build the world up.

So its not been a complete waste of time and we can use what we've got to kinda make more assets, but the most important thing is now we have fully documented design plans, world plans and most important a method that we can use. So its looking like were just going to focus on 3 buildings, 3 characters and then build outwards. Had a good chat with Adrian the production mentor who just wanted to get a feel for our concept. Except now all my beautiful production plans are redundant :'(
We working to a cool new system which is A B C

Basically A is what makes our game our game. Without it we have no game. B is what ive decided to snapilly call "Gameplay Plus", its the same gameplay but deeper and more of it. Then we have C which is all out frippery which has zero impact on the game and contains things like, dolphins, volcanoes, submarines, light houses, sheep.

We've been tormenting Ross all day as hes taken a bit of a kicking art wise due to the (as you probably gathered) schizophrenic development up until this point. We've got it sorted now promise ^^

So yeah, we do have loads of stuff but despite my pleas dont have a playable build of it all. Yesterdays blog was a bit short cos it was basically a day of "heated debate" - so apologies to any other teams who may be reading this fro our frequent rowdiness :)

The systems and optimization guy was really helpful and kinda bought us round to the small increments building methods. i don't know if it was the way he said it, or maybe because it took so many people telling us to kinda remove the idealism fog or cos he had loads of anecdotal evidence but, yeah, well be doing it that way. And just leaving the "A" world size the same so the art guys dont cry :)

Also Mark and Vicky from Introversion came along and gave us a speech on becoming a small independent. I found it particularly interesting, i think because of the publishing view point (reminded me of being back at uni due to the frenzied note taking) ,and also because I think a lot of their games really resound with gamers because they remind you of the kind of games you used to play as a kid, but modernised. Its kinda hard to explain what i mean but it makes sense in my head. High concept stuff generally, nice delivery as opposed to ok concept well delivered. Its also really really encouraging to see people making it on their own with out having to forsake rights and IP to a title that they created.

After wards he came round for a bit of a chat but kinda got ambushed by questions so sorry to the other groups and the Introversion guys for tying up all your time.
We got to see the terrain generator they are using for their new game - check out the video HERE

So its taken us 1 week to plan a nd balance a road network on an island with 15 or so buildings, and they managed to create a full city with Highways, road networks, full populated with different buildings and population densities and parks abou, id say approximately 100 times the size and x1000 the detail in about 30 seconds. Procedural generation is kind of the key for content creation in small teams as, we are finding out, it is very long and arduous to create very little in a team of about 5 :)

So kind of a good resolution to the week :D - ready to crack on next week, actually knowing what were doing and with any luck have something to fly about in by Monday with any luck.