Development Blog: Been awhile!

Whew! It's been awhile since I last blogged.

Lets see... we had a "presentation" on thursday which was a mock pitch kind of presentation. so... I decided to design our pitch slides :D

Ikr. I think it looks awesome XD

Sooooo yeahh after designing the slide template, I organized everything on the slides. Told Nic to compile his artworks and give me those he wanted to display. And also I went to look up steam games and looked at how they displayed their Game Features.

After a little research, I finished up the slides. (Game features, game mechanics, concept art, sound, project pipeline, game design doc) Whew.

I also updated the game design doc :D It was kinda hectic because we did like. FREAKING LOTS OF CHANGES. like omg.

Our initial idea was that since we were supposed to create a casual game, we thought we could include a few mini games for the player to enjoy while he goes through the game. So it becomes more of a... "Pick up whenever you want" kind of game.

But after crazy thorough discussions and from the presentation we did, we realised that the game we envisioned doesn't seem to be that fun.

SOOOOOO, as of friday(today), we totally revamped our mini games system. Instead we went back to our roots and initial idea which was the exploration of a new world. So we went back to the drawing board and started brainstorming.

Initially, we all thought we could focus most of our gameplay on the combat systems. SO we spent about an hour talking about how we can make it fun. Using grids to show enemies, utilizing arrow keys to create combos and also revolving most of our stuff around the combat.

We kind of ended up with this game whereby the player sends out a crew and they would battle against oncoming threats. And for the crew to use any action, they had to press a certain order of arrow keys (heavily inspired by patapon) before "casting" the action.

Then puvan came up with the idea of just using the arrow keys as different ammunitions for our attack which was just simple clicks on the enemy. I thought that was kinda okay but there were a few technical problems such as the clicking becoming too tedious and also difficult to track.

So it was 4:30pm. we were so freaking braindead and we were stoning and looking at our almost filled with doodled ideas board.

I finally decided that since it was a exploration game, the combat system should not be the core gameplay. (I'm not sure if this is a reliable source but Nic told us to read it and it seems kinda cool, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132022/fewer_mechanics_better_game.php?print=1) But according to the source, it seems that fewer mechanics would result in a less cluttered game and also a more cohesive game experience for the player. So I thought back to how we wanted the game during the very early idea phase. Exploration.

I drew what came to my mind and happened next was kinda awesome, everything fell into place.

I decided that hey if its an exploration game, why not make every island an expedition? So instead of just focusing on battle alone, I looked at the larger picture and explained everything to my team. What I wanted was that the player gets to choose an amount of crew members to send on an expedition and also give them an amount of food supplies. The crew would make their way through the island, stopping after a certain distance is covered. Actions would then be displayed for the player to choose from. From Searching for more food to resting for the day, the player would have to choose out those actions for the crew. The crew would then follow orders and occasionally, encounter enemies which would be more epic in size. I want the battles to be such that all battles are kind of epic (Kind of likeeeee Dark Souls) so most of the enemies would be larger in size as compared to the crew. This would give the player a sort of "exploring a new world" sort of feel when playing the game.

After telling them about my idea, they seemed pretty on board and we added a few more mechanics to it. Puvan will talk more about that in his blog. :D

As for the producer side of things, I think I'm lacking in the research area and will get cracking on it tomorrow :D

As for the art/story side! I decided to help nic on pixel art and also update on my story for the game! So... here are some of my stupid pixel art (it's crappy since IT'S MY FIRST TIME DOING PIXEL ART)