This passing week and the previous were about coming up with an interesting concept for a game to work on for the 8 months that we have this year (obviously). The good news is that my group (Dan Cortens, Lindsay Mikula, Sedona Parnham) started planning immediately, or as soon as all of us actually moved back to Oshawa. Learning from last year, we don't want to have to always wonder about what game mechanics are going to be possible, and what is officially in the game and what is not. We are going to start following our own advice that we gave last year at the presentations, where mainly we start small, start early and hopefully avoid missing out on hours of wonderful sleep (I've grown to cherish it now).
The bad news is that Cortens and Sedona wanted to do a 3D puzzle game and me and Lindsay wanted to do some sort of fighting game. There was discussion on strictly going one way or the other, and it wasn't really going anywhere, because two people would think of concepts for the puzzle game, while the other two would be more focused on realizing the fighting game idea. This went on for a while, mainly because we got conflicting information about which would be easiest to do. Some people told us that fighting games require a lot of precise collision calculations, and lots of other complicated mechanics. On the other hand, the 3D puzzle game has more physics intensive calculations, and its mechanics have to do with pushing/pulling objects and the player around using magnetic forces. Now, we don't usually pick the easiest way out (we were usually pretty ambitious), but in this case our philosophy for the rest of the year was get the basic mechanics out as fast as possible, and have time to make it polished enough to impress somebody who knows nothing about how games work (which is actually pretty ambitious anyway).
Our previous game, Raptor Racers, was quite an achievement for a group of students, and I'm proud of the work we've done. But arguably, to somebody who knows nothing about the underlying work required to make games, it wasn't really all that impressive. The AI was hilariously glitchy, collisions broke on people and the game just had hosts of issues, bugs and other annoyances. At the TIFF last [school] year, if the game happened to be feeling in a glitchy mood, people would just raise an eyebrow, laugh a little and then walk away not looking too impressed. I realized that the hard work, the technical achievements, the prestige that comes with trying something more complicated (building game from scratch as opposed to just using unity) doesn't really matter in the end. The end product is what speaks for you, and in order to really wow somebody, we're going to have to both push our own creative limits yet again, and hopefully squeeze in enough time to polish the game to make it respectable in its own right.
But enough of being pessimistic, the bad news did get resolved at the GDW on Monday this passing week when the themes were given out. The 3D puzzle game already had many game concepts already thought of, and it seemed to be more of a solid idea rather than the fighting game. The fighter was more us picking a genre and trying to go from there. The theme we picked was colour, which can go very easily with the puzzle game, but sort of harder to incorporate into a fighter without a proper concept first. In my opinion, a colour themed fighting game would be really cool (like having 4 fighters represent the 4 elements, and by extension having their own colour), but at that point, the rest of the group was essentially rooting for the puzzle magnets game idea, and I'd be the only one pushing for a fighter, so I just decided to let it go.
Next week, I'll probably blog about actual concepts for the magnet game, and my expectations and ideas for it.
