Reflections on: Octave

After a good months time and an exam out of the way, I believe it is time to take a critical look at Octave.

Octave started production in late february with a six person team (team Composerology!) and ended when we handed in the game late May. As already covered before I had the double role of lead designer (ensuring cohesion in the game) as well as 2D artist which are two roles I'm fairly happy with and feel like I have been succesful in fulfilling both roles.

When we started working on Octave we set out to build a unique universe with a creational musical tool to battle enemies and influence the environment. Furthermore narrative was quite important (however not really been implemented properly) so I will give a recap of it:
Octave Hertz Hobbman is a composer who, at the beginnning of the game, receives a letter from his estranged and dying father begging forgiveness for some unknown "sin" that he has committed. This "sin" should become clear throughout the game. (But unfortunately it doesn't really)

Positives:

• Hardworking team! I was extreemely lucky to be slotted in a very hardworking and ambitious team which really boosts your morale. Furthermore our PM (who chose the team) had chosen a very balanced team with people to fill every role needed very competently. Not much else to say on this topic, but it is worth mentioning.
• Dense universe. I had really worked overtime, especially in the beginning of the process to create a dense fictional universe for the game, which worked out as I believe it was key in creating cohesion in the game. There was a lot of fiction created for the game, which didn't make it in but that doesn't really matter because it was important that the team knows there is more behind and knows why characters are motivated by certain things. In that way, by creating this dense universe everyone else on the team would basically make decisions that would naturally slot seamlessly into the universe. (Which was almost 100% succesful)
• Communication. This production was different from last semester's production because it was both developed in a slightly larger team but more importantly that we were slotted into very defined roles. This has really prepped me towards how it is going to be when I am at one point "released into the wild" and also for DADIU next semester. Communication is key when everyone has their different areas to attend to and I really need to compliment our PM for his stand-up meetings everytime we got together. These little status checks gave us a good idea of what everyone had been doing and was going to do and in that way, we always knew where we had eachother and if anyone was starting to move slightly off course they could quickly be reeled back in. Furthermore I think I communicated the core ideas and universe of the game to the team fairly well through a very detailed and structured design wiki.

Negatives:

• Too much, too little space. The main reason why this game falls a bit short is due to the team collective high ambitions. The fact that we wanted to make a narrative driven game (with platforming/action mechanics) is in hindsight a mistake. Narrative takes subtlety and polish, something we didn't have time for (nor skills) and furthermore narrative, in cases where the actual game itself has action elements and fairly heavy mechanically, is pushed aside and left for the end. Completely understandable as gameplay HAS to work but it also means that we have a game that wanted to immerse and tell players a story, but ended up not even half-assed, but tenth of an ass in that regard.
• Live and let live. This is more of a personal reflection. As I was appointed lead designer/2D artist I should probably not have wandered into mechanics as much as I did. At the beginning of the process I was quite pushy in regards to what kind of a game I wanted to make and how I wanted the mechanics to be simple and intuitive. This point of view massively clashed with the level/gameplay designer's view and we had quite a lot of discussions on this and also started out with a very compromised main mechanic that was faulty. After we found out that our mechanic wasn't very good I finally was able to let go and give him his control and responsibility, and he got the solution that he wanted from the beginning. I am first and foremost a designer and therefore it's very natural for me to want control over a large part of the mechanics as it is so important for player experience. At the same time I am quite adventurous because these are student productions and therfore I'd like to push the envelope a bit. However I realise that sometimes I need to let go of control and trust the people around me.
• Difficulty level +10. This game is difficult and we completely missed the target audience that we had set up for ourselves. The target audience were gamers who were familiar with the WASD control scheme but weren't the kind who played religiously every day (basically me or someone with a little less experience than me). However we ended up with a game that only really hardcore gamers would be able to play, in fact the two least hardcore members of the team, our composer and myself even had some difficulty with the game. This is not necessarily a bad thing because our game just targets a very hardcore audience. But since we had set up a target audience I still find it a bit troublesome that we didn't hit it and I'm not sure if I should have done more to focus on the target, but it just happened to be natural progressing in our development.

I could probably go on writing pages on the reflection of Octave (which indeed I did, but that was more course related), however I will stop here. In general the production of Octave has been a very positive experience, I'm not elated with the end product but rather satisfied. I'll really miss the team and our awesome cake days especially also because I'm attending DADIU next semester, so won't really be seeing them in classes either. It's been a great team, great production period and a mixed end result, but never mind that.

Octave

It's finally here! The massive project for the game development course this semester was finally turned in two days ago and the result is pretty good.
Octave is a third person action/adventure where you play a maddened composer travelling into his own mind and using music to destroy his inner demons.
I am going to do a reflections post later, when there's a bit more time and also in order to get a bit of distance to the project. Until then here's a trailer (that I edited in Window Movie Maker).

In development: Octave (pt 2)

Pre-production is about to finish (or it actually just finished recently) on the massive game development project for this semester about the mad composer Octave Hertz Hobbman.

The pre-production period can be summed up in three words. No more art (please). As said in the previous post about Octave I was handed a triple role in this production including the role of 2d artist and therefore also designer of characters. I think I might have underestimated the scale of this role a little bit because thinking back on the pre-production I've been drawing A LOT, providing blueprints for the 3D artist, concept art (for something to look at I guess), sketches for all kinds of stuff. So what do you do if work starts to flood over, you delegate the task of designing some assets to the project manager and hey presto! Work has kind of been levelled out again (but not really, I still feel like I'm constantly working).

The art stress is also due to the fact that the design document as well as the narrative had to be pinned down in this period, which is why I really felt the heat. As artist is also my least favourite role and something I had preferred to hand over to someone more capable obviously I feel that it takes up too much of my time. But luckily the design document and narrative is now done and so I can ease a bit on those roles as I head into the production phase as an artist and writer (and UI designer), so hopefully I'll be able to enjoy the role of artist a bit more now.

RANT OVER.

The game feels like it's going to be good and we have a very balanced team (consisting of people who fill out all the roles pretty well). My only doubt right now is concerning the battle mechanic, which consist of a timer wheel where the player has to time mouseclicks with the right parts of the circle. All this is done in real time and from the sound of where the gameplay/level designer is headed, it sounds like there will be a fairly large amount of enemies. I don't like the sound of that because it's sounds like a difficult and frustating game, taking a fairly long amount of time to form a combo in order to battle just one enemies, if there are more of them, well...

But we shall see, scaling the number of enemies down will be easy enough, so might as well stress the engine and run lots of them in the testings, I guess.

Lastly here are some sketches of the combat wheel (cadence wheel as we call it), in case my description didn't make sense:

In development: Octave

Another semester, another game. Actually not only one game, but possibly three games to be handed in at the end of the semester which I'm already starting to stress about a little.

The first one I will introduce here is the biggest project called Octave and developed in a six man (and woman) team. What is the most interesting part about this project compared to the project last semester is that it has to be in 3D and that everyone in the team will have clear roles and responsibilities. A bit like a tiny development studio.


My role in this team is lead designer, writer and 2D artist. I'm quite happy about the first two roles as they were the ones I had originally hoped for and as we didn't have any 2D artists as such in our group, I was handed that role as well.
So responsibilities are mostly write material for the game, including setting up the game narrative, writing dialogue as well as writing in-team communication in regards to the game, in other words I'm responsible for writing almost everything in the development.

We have another designer in the team who is given the task of being both level and gameplay designer meaning that he will handle and produce all the smaller bits of the design and work out how exactly those things communicate with each other. I, as a lead designer on the other hand, have a more overall role of creating and securing a unified look and feel to the game. That is not to say I won't get involved in the other fields, I just won't be responsible for making it function in practical terms.

I predict it will be a gruelling development phase of about 3-4 months, but we'll make work.

Anyway, here is a short description of Octave and a piece of concept art I made:

Travel inside the mind of troubled composer Octave Hertz Hobbman, explore the depths of his creativity and the darkness that hides within it.
Use the unique recital battle system, where you, the player, creates and recites music to combat inner demons and restore the sanity of Hobbman


Octave is a third person action adventure game that places heavy emphasis on the musical world of the main character, Octave Hertz Hobbman. A unique recital system gives the player the opportunity to recreate powerful music to dupe and defeat enemies as well as manipulate the environment.