Week 5 - little on story more on gameplay

B00219590

In this weeks group session we talked a little about the story, I am quite adamant about the idea of having the characters that the player did not chose still be a main part in the story, not only that but also have the player interact with those characters as well. I was not suggesting this idea is unique but I myself have not found it in many games that I have played. So we are definitely keeping that in even though it might cause difficulties in creating the story. We all talked a little about how these characters are going to meet and if so what are there stances towards each other, we feel that the player must play though at least the starting mission to get a feel for the game then we will introduce the character, after that the characters will break off again until the next point that they meet.

Gameplay

Our team and myself have been wondering if the top down isometric view style is the best to convey the world in our game. I believe it is not, for many reasons one simple one is the fact that you can't immerse yourself in the world, we want the galaxy to be high in detail and dynamic from planet to planet changing from desert plains to sprawling cities we want the player to look at these worlds and feel engrossed in setting. If the game was shown from a top down perspective it would be hard to represent the world in the way we want to. So we have all decided to give the game a first person viewpoint, this will give the player a sense of actually being in the game. Another reason why I feel the first person view is better is that similar games like the elder scrolls games, fallout, and dishonored are very popular right now. Fallout is a funny case as that series started out as a top down rpg game, just like the one we started out on, and then it changed to a FPS, like we have done.

Week 4 - More on Story

B00219590

As of now we have a few things that we are 99% set on about the story, they are:

1. There will be three characters for the player to play as.

2. There will be a character that is enslaved and another character that is the enslavers the third character will     be a human from a different galaxy.

3.There will be a war between the enslaved and the enslavers. the human will have no definite favorite in the war.

This week we talked about where each character will start within the game. The slave race will start on their home planet being worked hard by the enslavers to mine resources. The aggressive race will start on a battleship getting ready to invade a planet for resources. The human will  begin his mission to find the main villain of the game, a war criminal that has started wars throughout the universe for the purpose of making money. This leads us onto our main story point, we have discussed at length the idea that there will be a main villain in our story and believe that it would be a great idea for the simple reason that it would tie all three characters together nicely and give them all a basic goal. we haven't really discussed what the character will look like or act but that will be for next week.

Week 3 Characters And Story

B00219590 09/10/12

Characters And Story

Our main topic of discussion this week was character development and story as described to us in the lecture. Starting with story, we already knew some minor points about our story like it being set in space in The Artesian galaxy while there was some type of conflict going on but this week we were going to try and beef the story up. None of what we talked about is set in stone because we want our game to have a very fleshed out and detailed story so one minor change would mean we would have to rethink the whole story meaning we need to be careful about what we make permanent.

Moving on to characters for a moment, We now agree on having three different playable characters each with their own backstory and each with somewhat different storyline but have them crossing paths multiple times during the course of the game. Two of these characters will be alien and one will be a human giving the player some choice. One of the aliens will be enslaved and then breaks free, the other alien could possibly be the enslaved races enslavers (not decided) while the human race will be a mercenary doing a job that in some way involves the other races.

Back to story, we have been thinking about how the conflict started , whose it between and what is there to gain from it. An idea that we came up with is that the slave race is revolting and so a sort of civil war begins and because the enslavers need the precious resources that the slaved race gather the war has a bigger impact on both races, the human race could be sent in favouring no particular side this could be chosen by the player. The goal of the game can change depending on character, for instance the slave races goal could be to free their race from oppression while the aggressive race could be set on becoming a general in there army.

Near the end of our discussion the three of us each picked a race and tried to find some source material to better show how our characters are going to look. I chose the human race character, although this is the easiest to find pictures of there has still to be parameters, the character is to be a mercenary so he has to look tough but not so much that its comical, He has a dark past so this could be shown on his face. I found images that interested me and made a collab of them. i will try and find a way to put it on here.

Week Two

B00219590 02/10/2012

Changes

This week our team has had a lot of change and a lot of tweaking our ideas. Firstly our game finally has a name "The Artesian Conflict", the name came to one of our team members after discussion online about it, I liked the word conflict as the game would be somewhat about war and so gave a few names of my own such as final conflict and delta conflict another team member suggested that the title should contain the place or area where the game is set, and thus the game had a name and also as a bonus the name of the Galaxy the game is set.

Another major change to the game is that we have removed space combat as a element as we felt that the game would become too crowed with the different types of play. We have taken out user controlled space flight as a whole opting for a more ground based  game, although there will be ways to travel to other planets.

Ideas Discussed This Week

These ideas are by no means set in stone but are here just so i can look back at ideas easily.

- Starting the character off as a premade class that can then be changed later on in the game. This will give the player a chance to be what they want in the game.

- PC and mobile for the platforms ?

- Teleport from planet to planet.