Goals of our Game

The team met today and we decided once and for all on the direction our game is going to take. We're going to stick with the action/puzzle idea in a 2D world. The main character is going to be a lowly I.B.L.O.U. grunt who gets kicked around by his superiors. I'll write more of the narrative later. Right now, I just want to jot down the goals of the game that we've developed. Ken Rolston said we have to have goals, so here they are:

1. Suction of trash/cohesion of trash ball mechanic
2. Portal/Warphole mechanic
3. Gravitational physics
4. Other guns?
5. RPG Elements of gun advancement/skill, purchasable upgrades

Goal number four is still under development. I'm gonna sketch some things out before our next team meeting this coming Sunday.

Oh yeah, we should probably meet with our mentor soon. I don't think Peter will buy the 'I've been suffering from lupus' excuse that I was going to give in class today.
-Charles

Concept Art

As Charles said, we had a brief meeting today just to go over some possible ideas for the game. I did some rough sketches of the spacesuit for the main character - à la the infamous Big Daddies of Bioshock. I'll probably be working on updating and cleaning up those sketches on Photoshop some time this weekend.

Also, I came up with a very rough (read: unfinished) background concept for the game via Photoshop:



I think the planet turned out pretty nicely. :D


~Xuan

Art Meeting

I met with Xuan today to swap some ideas about design, plot, and art. She liked most of the things I suggested: the Intergalactic Bureau of Locating Obstacles in the Universe (I.B.L.O.U.), localized damage, skill trees, the storyboard for the tutorial prologue, the open-ended world design, the big plot twist that I can't talk more about. Then she showed me some concept art for space suits; they were pretty wicked. I like that our game will essentially be Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and Bioshock all tossed into a blender. Since we're combining our favorite aspects from three of the greatest action/RPG's of all time, we really can't go wrong, right? Then Xuan showed me some of the photoshop work she had done. The dark planet scene looked awesome, but due to a discrepancy in the contrast of the monitor, I couldn't appreciate the full beauty of her second picture because certain parts of the image weren't being displayed. But it's kinda good that it happened that way because now we know to look out for that.

Unfortunately Xuan and I couldn't get much work done on the system or the setting or anything concrete like that. All we've really done is come up with some cool ideas and art. Our inability to design the game stems in part from our team's unanimous decision to incorporate RPG aspects into the gameplay. I was thrilled with this idea, but our group hasn't had a chance to meet together and talk about what exactly we mean to do. Xuan and I thought it would be presumptuous for us to decide such important aspects like the plot and the system just by ourselves, so we decided to call a team meeting tomorrow so we can nail down all the important details as a group. This is a team project, so everyone should have a say, yes?

Team name

During our hilarious lab section today in which we tortured four hapless students, Xuan coined a named for our team. She said she noticed last night that the little power buttons on computers look like I's inside O's, so we should call ourselves IO Games and that our logo could be that little power button design thingy. Eric pointed out that IO also means input/output from a programmer's perspective, so the name IO carries a clever double meaning. Then I added a useless anecdote about how Io is also a moon of Jupiter and the name of one of Zeus' mistress who wound up getting turned into a cow and doomed to be chased by a gadfly across Asia Minor for the rest of her cow life. I'm glad I bring so much to the table for our group.

Anyway, the point is that we have our team name. We are officially... IO Games. Has a nice ring to it, yes?
-Charles

Proposal

Met with the team today. Eric helped me finalize the technology part of the proposal. Unlike me, his writing was short and to the point. And with the help of everyone else, we were able to finish the schedule part of the proposal, too. Our plan at this point is to let Xuan and me design the first level of the game from a non-technical standpoint. Then once we have the art and the plot worked out, Jack and Eric can look at our ideas and see what they would need to program.

We're having a terrible time coming up with our team name. Everyone else seems to be naming themselves as if they were a game company. We don't wanna jump on the bandwagon, but we don't wanna feel left out, either.

In other unrelated news, we've established 5:30 PM on Tuesdays as our designated meeting time. While we're on the topic of non sequiturs, our mentor responded to us. He said that we would need to drive out to Hunt Valley to meet him. This will be a little inconvenient but not really a problem; I've got a car and I live around here, so I know how to get there. But as of right now I don't really know where 'there' is. I'm sure he'll give us directions later.
-Charles

Up and Running

I guess it goes without saying, but we registered for a blog on Blogspot.com so we have somewhere to keep track of our production status. Things are still in their early stages, but we figured out the general idea of our game in our brain-storm session after class today. The premise is loosely based off of Katamari Damacy in that the main focus of the game will be to gather items into a ball or some kind of shape; but unlike Katamari, which takes place on the Earth, our game will take place in outer space. Our game is set in the future (perhaps 2050, maybe even later) and the 'plot' is this: the population of earth has grown to a point where there is no longer any place to stash people's garbage. NASA comes up with the bright idea to start firing 'trash rockets' into space. The ramifications of this decision do not make themselves evident until many years and hundreds of trash rockets later. Eventually outer space becomes so cluttered that interstellar travel becomes an impossibility (I guess I should have mentioned earlier that humans have colonized different galaxies at this point in time in our game world). We haven't ironed out the specifics of the rest of the plot, but somehow Earth or some other nation develops an Intergalactic Sanitation Department whose agents use Black Hole Guns (or something) to round up the free-floating garbage in space. The player will assume the role of one of these Sanitation agents and his goal will be to gather the garbage floating around the stages while dodging obstacles and dangers like comets, stars, black holes, and space pirates. Other difficulties include time limits and the player's air supply. We plan to have realistic physics of gravity and interia that affect the player and his movement. The trash that the player collects will accumulate in front of the player, adding to his mass, affecting his movements, and eventually giving him his own gravitational pull. There will be certain excessively large pieces of garbage that can only be picked up when the player's personal ball of garbage meets a certain size. The game will be fairly linear, with a progression through different stages that gradually increase in difficulty. There will be a 'hub' stage from which all other stages are accessed through warpholes, but certain later stages can only be accessed once certain requirements have been met, which will add a degree of non-linearity. At the end of each stage, the player will be rewarded with money that can be used to purchase different upgrades (increased propulsion, etc.) There is also a plan to incorporate a multi-player aspect into the game, but we don't want to set our sights too high at this point. We decided that multi-player should take a backseat to getting the game itself built.

I think that's everything we covered in our brainstorm session today. We're meeting again tomorrow to finalize some of the specifics. I'm going to write up a formal proposal tonight so that my other teammates can review it tomorrow.
-Charles