Month: January 2020

Week 2 was a very powerful learning experience for the team. We had our weekly meeting with our faculty advisers, showing them our progress on our brainstorming. We showed them mood boards of fantasy concept art from games like World of Warcraft, a somewhat detailed high-level idea of a setting of a Victorian/Steampunk world, and an analysis of our four game inspirations. The only piece that we showed that was positively received was our game analyses. They looked at our setting and mechanics, and simply asked, “Why did you choose these options? What got you to this point?” 

Other than answering that we liked the steampunk aesthetic, we could not really go into detail. They then told us that we are trying to rush to begin. They said before answering any story details, we need to figure out what our Core Conflict is in our game. For example, one could argue that Star Wars’ Core Conflict could be Spirit (Jedi Monks) vs Tech (Sith). Instead of just arbitrarily choosing random settings and story points, we need to decide on what kind of story we want to tell with our game. They said that we first should look to whatever demographic we choose to tackle to see what conflict appeal to them. As stated in Week 1, we tentatively chose a young adult casual audience to try to see if we could develop a tactical RPG that would appeal to them. Our advisers advised against this as they felt like casual gamers and tactical RPGs are inherently at odds with one another, and we would make our lives difficult for no reason.

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They also took slight issue to one of our mood board compositions. It consisted entirely of images of World of Warcraft concept art (seen above in the bottom left). While these images are beautiful and could easily be made into a style we may be interested in, our advisers heeded against using game concept art as inspiration. They gave us Riot Games as an example of how to properly start the art pre-production phase. They created a champion in League of Legends named Gangplank. In order to create his design, the entire art team spent months researching pirates in every corner of the world. They pulled art from various cultures, noting how they may visually change according to their location in the world. They then created their hero by mixing all of the various pirate cultures together in order to create a pirate that had some visual recognition to almost all players in the world. Their anecdote was meant to teach us that looking at game art is basically already looking at a filter of the real thing. We should look at real world art, photos, paintings, and movies to draw inspiration from. If we only look to other game worlds for inspiration, we may end up copying their style instead of creating our own.

After receiving all of this feedback, we then decided to meet together to discuss Core Conflict and a change in target demographic. We quickly pivoted to a hardcore young adult audience as they are the most inclined to enjoy tactical RPGs. When discussing the Core Conflict, we found that we had no idea where to begin. If we just began to list common Core Conflicts in media, how could we possibly arbitrarily choose one? If there is even two pitches for a Core Conflict, someone or a group of people would end up frustrated because their idea would not get picked for no real reason. Without grounding our idea in anything, choosing a Core Conflict would make someone end up feeling like their opinions are not valued. However, there is the same issue in trying to ground the setting without a Core Conflict. Without anyone explicitly being in charge of these decisions, there is no way to fairly choose without someone’s opinion losing out. After a few days of discussing how to go about this issue, we all figured out why our faculty warned us about total creative freedom. We then all decided to allow our advisers to act as clients to pitch us a concept for us to work on. We were given what you see below:

We were given a time, Core Conflict, setting, and a possible story idea. This gave us the grounding we need to be able to hit the ground running. We had our artists begin researching paintings of soldiers and commoners, and studying the architecture of France in the fourteenth century. We had our designers begin to research the weapons of the time, and research games that have used this setting to get inspirations for mechanics or area design. We then had our last two members begin to research people, places, and events of the time. This includes the 100 Year War between England and France, and the Black Plague that swept the world at that time. We also started to research music during the time period, all to begin to find inspiration for what we wanted our game to be. Our major takeaway from this week was our realization of the horrors of having no constraints in a creative space. In an ideation period where there is nothing to base ideas off of, how do you possibly judge ideas in an unbiased manner? With a development cycle as short as fourteen weeks, we did not have the time to spend arbitrarily debating ideas that we cannot prove to be the correct approach or not. We needed a base to start off of, and we are now have a direction to head towards for next week.

Week 1 consisted entirely of high-level brainstorming for our idea. Since our project is Pre-Production for a year-long game, we did not have much of a prompt in terms of direction. We met with our faculty advisers who gave us the option of having as many or little constraints as possible. They told us that they could give us an entire idea to give us full constraints, or allow us to dive in to be as free as possible. It initially seems like an easy question to answer. Why would you ever choose to have the freedom of creativity taken away from you? They then gave us a warning that going completely free can lead to a lot of unexpected issues of deciding factors such as genre, target demographic, and platform. All of the time spent deciding that could be used to begin working if we were given these as constraints from the beginning.

We all sat down to talk to see what approach we believed would be best to use for our team. We began by asking “If you had the choice what type of game would you want to make?” Surprisingly enough, we had half of our team answer a tactical strategy game and the other answer RPG. So, we could easily combine to be a tactical RPG, similar to games like Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics. We also all decided that we wanted to go for a more stylistic fantasy setting for our game. Since it only took us a total of five minutes to decide on a genre and a broad setting, we decided that we could most-likely figure out the rest just as easily. We let our advisers know that we decided to choose the free route, and begun to figure out the rest.

So we knew what genre of game we wanted to make, so what should we decide on next? Target Audience? Story? Setting? We sat down to try to figure out where to start. We started by asking why this genre appealed to everyone in the first place, and what games got you into the genre. After getting some pretty vastly different answers among the group, we ended up at a place with not much to work with. We then threw around the idea of making a tactical RPG whose purpose would be to bring newcomers into the genre. We all may not have connected with why we love the games, but we know we love them. Let’s make a game that attempts to let others fall in love with the genre we all already do! 

We also decided to  pick a few games we wanted to use as inspiration for our project, and began to research each one to dig into their design. We choose Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Into the Breach, Darkest Dungeon, and Final Fantasy Tactics. We had our Designers play through the games to grab aspects they liked and did not like, then came together to discuss our findings. We wanted to find out what we felt about each game, good and bad, in order to see what we would want to (and not to) carry over into ours. Our artists also started creating moodboards for the style of fantasy they wanted to create to begin to get a visualization for our game. They took images from both games and paintings to get a feel for the color palette and style they wanted to create.

Then we had a genre and tentatively had an audience, so let’s start with our world and story! This is where our mindset from our Immersion Semester at the ETC got us in trouble. In this semester, we essentially worked under the mindset of rapid prototyping. We would have crazy short deadlines to make something that worked and was fun (usually 2 weeks), so we are all used to working under these constraints. This is a complete foil to the idea of pre-production, so we were in conflict with the core of our project. We began to rush to try to come up with a rough story, brainstorm mechanics such as adding roguelike elements to the game, and try to pick a setting. We did not have much of a reason as to why we were pitching what we were (other than it being cool), so we did not know what would be a good or bad approach. This led us to spend a lot of time brainstorming concepts and ideas that had no reason behind them.  We ended the week with a strong idea in genre, but a jumbled mess of ideas for essentially everything else.