Sunday 1 March 2015

Alice vs the Redesign

This week we talked a lot about the length of the game and where we wanted to focus our attention, at this point it became clear that Myself, Jake and Christie were in charge of the Forest, Hallway and Canal respectively. Based on this any questions on direction on each of the areas tended to be directed towards us. I think this made the group more stable as there was now some form of internal organisation starting to appear. As me and Jake are the most familiar with engine, this also helps since we would be the ones working most closely with the mechanical aspects of the level. I've also noticed that a general pattern in all the groups I've worked with so far, is that the engine person tends to be the leader of the group, just because of the funneling process and the responsibility of the actual 'construction' of the level. It's also up to you to know what is possible and what isn't and design around our engine skills.

This week we also talked about our long term goals, obviously we all want to win the competition, but it's also important that at the end of the 11 weeks, we all have nice portfolio pieces. The problem is that is our three character artists then all wanted to do characters- naturally. It's a strain on the group since we felt that the only character necessary was Alice herself, and the others could be done on stylistic planes. However it's unfair on our character artists if this is what they wanted for their portfolio on our final project of the year. Our decision to let the caterpillar and the rabbit become major modeling characters was a mix of obligation to abide by the specialization list, and the knowledge that in these early stages of the project we wanted our group to fundamentally work happily together. It does make me slightly nervous though, since it means only the minority of the group will be actively working on the environment.

We also talked this week about what major puzzles we wanted, for definite these were a rabbit chase, a size puzzle and platforming puzzles. The details aren't quite ironed out but just knowing what gameplay elements we're working with makes it easier to concept around.

The personal kicker for me came at the end of the week when Jake returned from his trip to talk with the people behind the Off The Map project in Oxford. He basically told us that they were looking for something strongly grounded in Oxford and the lore of the book. This didn't fare nicely for my magical, emmisive mushroom forest. Yep.

I needed to re-coat my forest in a fresh paint of traditional British realism. Right down to the mushrooms. 

RIP emmisve mushroom lights. Week 1- Week 4


No comments:

Post a Comment