During the first week, we were introduced to the whole concept of GDD’s and how they work, as well as discussed our major and minor focuses that we wanted to improve/work on this year.
Minor focuses are essentially things you would like to improve your skills at. In my case, it is 3D modelling and environmental design. I would also add animation here, but it is not something I would like to be specialising in.
Major focuses are the things you feel comfortable with and your skills have been improved to a solid level. I have worked a lot on character design before, as well as story telling and traditional/digital drawing in general.
One of our first activities was centred around metaphorical concept of movement. Everyone was asked to bring an image that, in their opinion, represented movement in a certain way.
This is a photo made by Jay Mark Johnson, and he specialises in creating time-lapsed panoramas that capture the movement perfectly. The variety of images he has created is inspiring, and every single one of them represents a sealed moment of time where the motion was a key element.
The picture I chose resonated with me the most due to its simplicity, as well as its colour palette and abstract nature. Horizontal lines go really well with the stuck in time train, looking like its moving too fast, yet not moving at all.
As everyone in my group shared their own images, the task was to create as many connections with the word “movement” as possible. We went from nature to thought process to physics, and I think it perfectly shows that in our world, the motion can be found in everything and it is key to our existence.
After we have completed the mind map, we started generating ideas from our images using basic set of words (verb, noun and adjective). That way, we could combine words from different images into something new and different. On top of that, we shared our ideas for game mechanics and outcomes to finally choose one idea that would eventually become our game concept. We chose the idea that originated from my image, and the set of words was “moving in static space”, which we turned into a metaphor for procrastination and mental health struggles.
The game is about a person who struggles to move on in their life, therefore being stuck in their own head and not being able to wake up the next day. Procrastination often feels like the time around you freezes, even though you know it’s happening only in your head and the world around you keeps spinning.
We wanted to present the process of dealing with this dark episode of life through interacting with the room you need to clean up and coming across the memories of times where the character was happy. That way, seeing what they used to enjoy and how cheerful they looked around people who are dear to them, they overcome their troubles and find motivation to move forward and finally wale up in the new day.
This really helped me understand more about idea generation and how usually unrelated topics can be developed into something more if put together.