Capstone Production Blog 1

With the confusion that usually comes from a game production cycle, each member of the team is writing up blog posts every week as a breakdown of what kind of work was done, and how each member views it. Since I am the team’s one and only programmer, most of my view on this project is going to be focus on the technical side of the game development process.

Except for this week or two.

For the last two weeks, the team has been working as hard as we could on the brainstorming process. The goal was to come up with as many ideas as we could and boil them down to the ones that every agreed on.

After three days of three hour meetings, we came up with a total of about 30 ideas, and from there consolidated them into four. These four we were confident in and decided that these would be the ones to show off.

First one was “My Prices Are More Than Fair”, a merchant simulation game in which you play as a merchant in a fantasy world building up stock to sell to adventures for copious amounts of coin. Our idea was to add a dungeon mechanic to the game as well, in order to get more good for the shop.

Second idea was “Wizards in Training”, which is a third person spell slinging game, where you get different spells based on what levels you choose to visit, and you use these spell to beat monsters and complete various puzzles.

Third idea was “Warm Fighter”, a top down isometric shooter that had a focus on boss fights. You fight giant lava worms, or “warms”, with a slew of different ice based ranged and melee weapons. In a almost twin stick style, you move your character around, dodging the bosses attacks, and trying to hit the boss enough times that would finally cool it down enough to finish it off and haul it aboard your ship.

The fourth idea was “The Watcher”, a top down game as well (in theory) where the focus is pushed away from fighting, and pulled more towards solving conflicts with good decision making. In the game you are the middle ground between the magical and the mundane, and you must use this position you have in order to help better the residents of both.

Of course, the issue that was had was that they were not really fleshed out enough, so during the second week of the production cycle, we worked towards making these ideas into actual concepts that we can start working from.

In this we were forced to drop “The Watcher” idea, as it did not play to a lot of the teams strengths and might have poised a difficult game to test effectively.

Overall, the team is very much together when it comes to any of these ideas. I know certain members are more attached to one than the others, but we all know to put the project before our own wants and will be willing to work on any of these concepts going foreword.

Next step will be to further flesh out these game concepts to get teams on the same page on everything, and then create the prototypes needed to test our core mechanics.