Newsletter 6
Week 6 was important to neuraltone, as we made a major decision and chose to expand upon the Radial Shooter as our game for the semester. This choice was informed by feedback we got from quarters, as well as by an examination of our team’s art expertise and programming skills. The Radial Shooter game also gives us some flexibility as far as theme is concerned, which we also discussed this week.
Quarters presentations took place on Friday the 15, and feedback was mostly positive. We were encouraged by the excitement shown about the project itself; most of the faculty found the whole concept of using a video to teach implicitly to be fascinating. Our team was heavily encouraged to test our game design with Dr. Holt as early as possible in order to ensure its usefulness as a research tool. To this end, we have scheduled to being research testing
in week 8, and we are pushing our development schedule more aggressively to reach that goal.
Theme discussion.
We sat down on Wednesday and brainstormed theme ideas for the Radial Shooter game. Here’s a list of some of the better ideas that came out of that process:
1. Fairlyland
2. Deep Sea
3. Horror
4. Space / Other Planets
5. Steampunk Dirigibles
6. Forest
7. Caves/dungeons
8. Helicopters
After discussion, we decided to push forward with a space theme. We chose this theme for some specific reasons: First, it’s relatively easy to manage from the art side. We can make space look good with effects and lights, instead of hand-painted backdrops. Second, it’s easier to justify unusual enemy visuals when you can say they’re aliens. Finally, Dr. Holt’s current game is space themed, and they’re used to dealing with that realm.
We feel that this theme will allows us great flexibility to expand the game with interesting visuals and locations, while keeping the required art assets and content creation to a minimum.
For the coming week we plan to start and finish a mock-up of the customization tool, develop the base game to a playable state, and begin playtesting our some new design theories. It promises to be an adventure!