Week 1 (again): In Which an Idea is Born and a Blog is Reused; Also Art!

Another year has started and so has our next game (tentatively title PIVOTal). Over the past week we have brainstormed many, many ideas narrowing it down and refining it to something achievable yet still challenging. We even managed to pick a perfect theme to go with our game (I’ll let that be a surprise, but I’m sure someone else must have posted it anyway).

We decided to make our game in a Metroidvania style, somewhat similar to Shadow Complex. As is common within a Metroidvania style game we have agreed upon trying (and hopefully succeeding) to make a huge game world, inside a factory, with many power ups and collectables. The main action of our game will be dedicated to solving puzzles with occasional combat. In order to make our game more unique we added the element of rotation. During the players time in the factory they will come across rooms that allow them to rotate the entire world (as if on a pivot, like our title; clever, I know). This rotation opens up new paths for the player to advance as well as alters existing paths to create new puzzles in order to return from whence they came.

This year has been my most looked forward to year of schooling for two main reasons: We get to choose anything we want and we have a dedicated modelling class (nothing against programming). This first week we have only managed to just get WildMagic up and running so we haven’t had much time to look into it, but there has already been some playing around with it. All of us have been working on our sketches this past week for various character designs. The artistic style we are going for is a semi-realistic steampunk world mixed with surreal and terrifying monsters. I was already told my drawing was too detailed so I may have to scale it back a bit when modelling to fit with everything else in our game.

I'm very proud of the shoelaces, on both the shoes and the hat.

I was tasked with the creation of the main character, which I’ve spent a very long time on. I’m trying to take on as much modelling work as I can for our game this year as that is what I ultimately want to do once done with university, and I need the experience.

Also our team name was decided to be ProTesters, in hopes to conjure an image of a game that stops you in your tracks and is so captivating that you’re literally forced to experience it for at least an hour. Also there’s testers, like game testers, which I assume is the meaning everyone else was going for.

Next we will start turning our 2D drawings into 3D, although I plan on trying to get a head start on that, as well as starting to mess around some more in WildMagic. Now without much further ado… The End