Panic #1

AAAAAAaarrrrrrrrrrgh! But more on that later -

We kicked off the day by determining what elements of the game really promoted our concept. This was a really good exercise as it allowed us to streamline the idea and retain the core mechanics as well as mold the players focus around these actions. First and foremost we want everything the player does in the world to be fun.

This will mainly be derived from creating comedy situations using the nudge arrow. Were currently building a list of events so watch out for the live lobster and errant dog!

At this stage it is now really important to make sure we have a strong art style with lots of nice touches that really give the game world its own look and feel. A large part of this will be on the character such as opening of the wings and how he draws the bow etc.

The mechanics of the day / night cycle are out, and whilst they still exist are only there for aesthetics to show off some of our fancy dynamic shadows and nice colored light trails from the arrows. Also gone is the info arrow in favour of the new "spark system". Since the majority of the missions take place outside we thought it would be really nice to see sparks fly when two compatible individuals cross paths. turns out me and Cactus jack arn't so compatible :(

Today rowen knocked up a compatibility prototype, after a brief wrestle with getting simultaneous path generation, of 2 NPC's crossing paths. A compatibility % is then generated by a personality array, which directly affects the intensity / amount of sparks generated. Rich also nailed down the HUD icons and arrow colours and is currently in the process of adding illumination to the arrows which ought to provide some real nice graphical touches.

Art wise Dave worked on some more sketches and started colouring buildings to give us a feel for how the world looks. We imagined it as a very Mediterranean urban area with influences from new countries such as America / Australia. Its amazing how much thought needs to be given to art direction as thats what shapes the look and feel of your world. Ross also began blocking out the game world which was really good as it allowed us to play about with height levels and work out how things would be set up (logically) in the world, as well as building up some of Daves sketches ready for texturing and importing.

We also found out today that the first round of judging is done by the general public, hence the panic. We were initially concerned that with only 5 minutes of play time the user might not get the topic (admittedly the majority of flapping was done by myself). This was really good as it allowed us to evaluate how we are engaging users from the outset and how we are handling our art style to be as inclusive as possible. Ultimately we realized that we don't need to change how our game is progressing to make a relatively small, but vocal hardcore (that may not even be present) influence the way the project looks and plays. An important part will be getting as many playable builds up as possible in our ten weeks to get as much feedback as possible, hopefully we should have our first one before too long for upload ^^

Been a fairly solid day, finished off some adminy stuff such as more contracts to sign as well as confiring names etc for flights to Scotland for Protoplay :). More next week when we will have loads of art, etc as well as a formal weekly update on the dare site as well as news of our personality profiling ! ?! ^^