New Beginnings
Apologies in advance, this might be a bit of a short post, since I am personally not feeling all too well at the moment (mostly, but not limited to, suffering from tight hip flexors, which put me in excruciating pain everytime I move and contributing to a lack of sleep).
We started our new project this week, which is also our very own entry to the 'Off the Map' competition. You can find a lot of information about this competition here: http://gamecity.org/alices-adventures-off-the-map/ Since it is celebrating its 150th anniversary, this years Off the Map competition is based on Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. This is a group project, but luckily this time around they decided to assign us groups based on what we think we are best at and I am quite happy with the group that I was put in.
This week mainly consisted in a lot of decision making and personally for me I didn't get to do a lot stuff. I started off by sitting together in my group and discussing possible ideas of what we could create. Our university specific brief was pretty much the same as the original Off the Map brief, with the slight modification of stating that it had to be a playable game and not just a pretty environment. Originally the brief asked for a side-scroller but was changed soon after they announced the project to be more open. In our case we therefore decided to make a first person adventure game. We also came to the conclusion to base our level on the topic 'Gardens'.
I then went onto reading the book. The first step to making a game based on a book is logically to read through it. This covered pretty much most of the first day. I also did some research into games that we could use as inspiration. After that we sat down once more within our group and started discussing our level in more detail. 'How is it going to work?' 'What does the player have to do?' We also thought about a couple of designs and eventually settled on a final design pretty quickly. I then went into creating some basic game mechanics, since for this project I decided that it would be most beneficial for me to stick to engine related work. as well as modelling (These seem to be my strongest points). One of the first things we wanted to have was the ability to shrink and grow the player (just like Alice shrinks and grows throughout the book.) This was quite an easy task to achieve for myself and I managed to draft a quick blueprint for that.
Throughout the rest of the week this continued onwards and I created more useful blueprints. I also started modelling some rocks, which required me to once more dive into zBrush and figure out a way of using that piece of software. I seemed to get the hang of it towards the end, however I wasn't too pleased of the final baked-down results within engine, so I will have to spend a bit more time trying out different things for that at some point in time.
Unfortunately that is it so far. I haven't got any pretty pictures to show, however you can head over to Anya's blog for some great environment concepts, as well as Denise's blog for some amazing character concepts. Also check out my other team-mates: Mark, Sharnleigh and Rebecca. See you next week~
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