Lesson 1
This lesson we had the task to begin exploring concept ideas revolving around “movement” for the game we would be making a GDD on for the semester.
I already had an idea that related to movement which I had been working on conceptualising in my own time. This idea was about the movement from death into the afterlife. The main character being a grim reaper tasked with allocating this woman into the right place, but data about her existence on earth is missing, so as the player you’d be investigating her identity, solely based off how she acts, dresses and chooses to tell you.
A gameplay idea for this would be to have a main dress up minigame where you dress this woman up and do her makeup for when she goes on stage. I’ve recently been feeling very nostalgic for my childhood and the games I used to play, such as flash games. Every now and then I would play these dress up games where you drag the clothes onto the character and stuff like that. Even though I wasn’t a big fan of them, they still left a mark on me, and I really wanted to explore the dress up concept into a game of my own.
I’ve also been playing Infinity Nikki, which is a dress up game at the core, it’s also hade me more conscious of how much I’ve wanted a proper character customisation feature in a game.
However, this idea is a big idea of mine that I simply do not believe I will be able to explore properly as coursework. It’s too broad and complicated
We also had to pick an image related to movement as well that we’d be needing for the next lesson. As I searched, I stumbled on an image of a floc of birds, inspiring me with another game idea.
I thought about “what if the entirety of humanity had to migrate somewhere else?” which is a very interesting concept about the end of the world. this idea isn’t open world or anything, it would be something like a visual novel almost. It would have character exploration and try to send messages about morality and understanding humanity’s flaws, etc.
I ended up picking this image for “movement”, I thought it was beautiful and full of life, with the movement of light and people dancing, demonstrating a strong sense of community and trust.
We had to decide what our minor and major focuses were which is our interests. This lesson I had determined that drawing, character art, and narrative design were my strongest attributes for the course, and my minor focus were things such as environmental design, 3d modelling and coding, all things I want to improve on as I want to be able to make a whole game myself at some point.
Lesson 2
Later in the week we actually made use of the images we picked with the purpose of thinking creatively about game design ideas. We were put into groups of 4 to do this.
The first thing we did was make a mind map about “Movement” to get into the headspace.
My image at first glance makes me think of community and trust. The large godlike figure in the sky who kind of resembles a star, seems to be leading the group in a way and showering them with light. Everyone is dancing and celebrating as they follow, showing they love and trust this figure, and so does the figure back to them. The artist is ELIOLI, and this is artwork from their WEBTOON called “The Moon and Me”.
After we put all our images together, we began to add post it notes to each image as instructed, at first writing the emergent themes to each image in one word each, then we put together all the matching themes. We were then told to add verbs, adjectives and nouns to the clusters.
From these clusters we had to come up with experimental metaphors by looking at the clusters and determining what kind of real life experience they could relate to. Then we came up with game experiences by combining the verbs, nouns and adjectives.
[image]
I was considering two ideas, the fastforwarding through the city one (explain why) and the dance one. I picked the dance idea (check) wrote this and that,,,,
By the end I had this idea: the player must pick the right dance moves to appease and bring together the entire audience. The point is to make people understand each other’s differences and stories and how similar we can all be despite being from different places with different experiences. The point of the dance could be to make the audience happy, emotional, etc. messing up would result in the audience getting angry, offended, etc, doing right would make the audience glow yellow.
