Week 11: More pitch presentation refinement!

.This week we’ve made more headway in refining the very rough version of our pitch presentation we debuted last Friday, taking our client’s feedback into account as we continue to flesh out our art, game design, and gameplay demo.

The Work This Week

Art Updates, Specifying Tasks in The Heart, and Creating a Name for the Game

Based off of our client meeting last Friday as well what we’ve determined we still need to create for our pitch presentation internally, we came up with the following tasks for this week:

• Create concept art for different game structures, especially our State Share game structure
• Continue to iterate on the overall level design
• Match the in-game VFX and aesthetics to the concept art created this week
• Refine VFX for the bloodstream from the one showed in our prototype at Halves
• Determine the final name of our game

As per usual, we managed to get the majority of these tasks done in the span of a single week!

Liangzheng created a new sketch and model of the map that not only better reflected the structure of a heart, but also created 4 different quadrants for the heart itself, with the final area housing the largest cluster of viruses in the map (and thus the end game for the session). He also created some initial models for the white blood cell and viruses based off of our concept art, as well as some simple environmental assets for the actual 3D model of the map he built in Blender in order to provide some extra visual pop in the map.

Jue created additional concept art for our State Share structure, which are called “Lymph Nodes” in the game, as well as some initial concept art for what an in-game screenshot will look like, which she will continue to refine next week.

Tracy refined the look of our bloodstream in the map and made an initial pass at editing the environmental shaders to bring them more in line with our concept art’s look.

Additionally, we determined more game mechanics for the white blood cell, such as a skill system where players can acquire abilities that will enable them to hunt down viruses more efficiently than before. One of these skills can be gained the first time a player joins the game, but you can acquire subsequent skills by “inheriting” them from other players when they send you an invite into their game. In other words, if you have Skill X and Y, and your friend, who has Skill A and B, invites you into a game, you will be able to inherit either Skill A or Skill B when you actually enter the game, expanding your cellular arsenal further.

And finally, we were able to settle on the following 3 names for our game: Cell Squad, Leuko, and Immunoo!.

Client Meeting

We updated Erin on our current progress this week and sought her feedback on the final 3 names we had chosen. Below were their thoughts on the latest version of our presentation:

• They recommended we either go with Leuko or Immunoo.
  • Cell Squad was a bit too on-the-nose and more war-like than we probably intended, whereas Leuko and Immunoo sounded playful enough to match the game we had designed.
  • Currently, her pick was Leuko, but she said that if we dropped the “!” from Immunoo, that would work well too.
• Think about what players will need to do in each part of the map, outside of just needing to get to the final quadrant for the “boss” battle

Other than the above, our client was happy with our current progress and looks forward to seeing what we bring to next week’s meeting!

The Plan for Next Week

Outside of the above criticisms from our client, we still felt that we needed to provide some real mock-ups of the game that were more than just concept art. As such, since previous advice from GDC presentations on game pitches have said to use game protoypes that were more mechanically inclined than aesthetically, we decided to focus next week on creating some quick “programmer art prototypes” of our gameplay hooks we’ve currently developed in order to turn them into GIFs for the presentation.

We’re also going to continue to iterate on both the aesthetics and overall level design in accordance with both Erin’s comments and our own internal bar of quality.

Finally, we were also able to definitively settle on a name for our game: Immunoo! Of all the game names we pitched, this one was both the most popular internally on the team, and seemed to convey a positive affect without being too blunt on what it actually means (outside of the fact that it’s a simplification of the word “immunity”) like Cell Squad was.

In summary, our tasks for next week are the following:

• Create a logo for the game
• Create “programmer prototypes” of different gameplay inside of the game so that we could put them as GIFs into our presentation.These include eating viruses, highlighting the bloodstream mechanic, and if possible, a simplified State Share prototype
• Refine our bloodstream VFX so that the red blood cells look less “flat” and 2D.
• Refine the VFX and models for both the player and the environment
• Create concept art that represents what would be a screenshot from the game.
• Flesh out what kind of tasks need to be done in each quadrant of the heart and update our overall level design/level sketch to reflect this