Author: bbadger

Week 5 consisted of the team digesting and reacting to faculty feedback from the previous week. We received a lot for us to parse through, such as the overscoping of our story to best practices of designing characters. We want to make sure  that we are taking our faculty’s feedback, all while also keeping the core of our experience.

Beginning with the narrative, we began to flesh out the role of the “Plague Doctor” avatar and his place in the world. We were torn between making the avatar either a human turned lackey of the Devil, or make him a demon from fictional hell to destroy the country. We ended up choosing a human being as we believe it syncs well with the idea of the plague bringing suffering and misery to the world. Our current direction for this character is that he is a father whose daughter becomes ill from the plague. The Devil makes a deal with him that he will cure the daughter in place of the human helping to destroy the Church and nobility of the nation. The Devil gives him the Plague powers, and takes the daughter as collateral until the deed is accomplished. While a bit of a trope or cliche, we decided to use it to our advantage in order to set up the story quickly. We only have a few hours of gameplay we will most likely finish by the end of next semester, so we should create a story that does not need much explaining. The idea of a father using these evil powers on the world to save his daughter is a compelling and possibly a relatable story for players. It may make parents consider what ends they would go to in order to save their children. 

Moving onto game mechanics and gameplay, we created a mock AI system for the enemy units to follow during our paper prototype. We wanted to create some sort of easy system for our designers playing the enemy to follow what would most closely resemble what the enemies may feel like in-game. Our designers also did begin on deeply documenting all core gameplay elements that we will pass off to the next team. We also began our weekly sprint cycles with prototyping in engine. Our first sprint for programming was the implementation of units on a grid who are able to move around and fight each other.

We wanted to get the bare basics of gameplay set for this sprint to judge how long other aspects may take. We have two more sprint cycles before we present our work for halves (midterms), and we want to be able to show off our main mechanic of the Plague Doctor using the plague on units. Having the unique game mechanic to show for our presentation is where our priorities lie.

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Over on the art side, we took the advice of riffing off of a base design of a character in the fourteenth century to heart. Our artists created multiple sketches of what a “knight” may look like, and we came together to discuss aspects we liked and disliked from each design. This helped the whole team come up with a unified vision of our knight. This style of art review we found to be extremely helpful, so we are going to continue with this approach going forward! We also have some new concepts of other locations in the world shown below:

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We wanted to get a general direction for the style we wanted to go with when creating different types of structures. Our next goal with environments is to bring our narrative and art members together to finalize locations and environments where the player will go to. This will allow our artists to create specific environment sketches from here on out.

Week 3 was where we began to put our research into practice. This week, we wrote out our first draft for our world and story, began to prototype gameplay elements, and began to conceptualize some art that we want to have in our game. 

Beginning with the story, we started from the idea of Light vs Dark. We were given the idea of making the plague the physical embodiment of Satan bringing hell on Earth, along with the plague giving people dark magic. We found that idea enticing, but it left us with one issue story-wise. We as a team were more interested in the idea of our theme of Good vs Evil being based on the perspective of the player. We did not want a moustache-twirling villain or saints of justice. We wanted there to be good and bad aspects of both sides (like the real world), and the player internally chooses which they believe to be the lesser evil. We believe this idea will make our world feel more believable as it mirrors most real world events and groups. We combined these two ideas by making the plague in the dark powers coming from the Devil and Hell be the perception of the people in the world. It is nothing more than another type of magic in the world, but the wielders of Light magic who are in power claim it to be evil. 

As stated above, we also delved into gameplay mechanics and some paper prototyping of mechanics that we were interested in. We knew we had a fascination with Area of Effect attacks on our grid, and we wanted to get a feel for how those would work. Area of Effect attacks are attacking moves that would hit multiple tiles on a grid, contrary to just hitting one tile or unit. We also wanted to get a feel for movement of different types of character classes, like infantry and calvary, to see how each can feel different on the map. We brought out a large grid map, and     assigned colored dice to be different types of units. 

From looking at the images above, we started to play around with how we may want our AI to be programmed, how to properly balance AI against the player, and how positioning in combat will work exactly. As of this week, we found that placing units in diagonals is optimal in order to avoid Area of Effect attacks more easily. We are still in the infancy of playtesting, but we have already learned a lot about how our gameplay should be structured. 

We also began to draw out some beginning rough concept art for both characters and architecture. Our artists have been researching and collecting inspiration and references from all over, including art from the fourteenth century and architecture from buildings at that time.

After spending a lot of time researching how buildings, people, and weapons looked like, we wanted to begin sketching right away. We want to get used to iterating on these sketches dozens of times, so we get a feel of the style we want to use as quickly as possible. In the early stages of a development on a game, getting a feel for what styles we like and dislike is crucial. We want our artists to be constantly sketching as some piece of art could be inspiration for a major component of the game. 

This week was about diving into early stages of all aspects of the project to get our feet wet essentially. We have quarter presentations in Week 4 to receive feedback from faculty to get their insight as to opinions on what we currently have, and what direction would be best to be headed next. 

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.