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.

The dictator (on hold)

I have decided to put the dictator on hold for now. Something that unfortunately happens too often, where I start a project and end up putting it on hold (sometimes definate, sometimes not).

The reason why is mainly that I suddenly got busy with two game projects in spring semester and a programming project (likely also a game). And frankly juggling around four digital games is no fun.
The other reason is my insecurities as an artist. I want this game to look good (better than the ones I've made before) and in order to do that, I either need to find an artist or become a better artist myself, both of which will take time.

It's always a bit of a downer when you have to put a project on hold, especially one where you actually have put in some work rather than just conceptualising. But I am however working on a new and physical game, where my programming skills aren't needed and art consists mainly of graphic design, so this will be a nice break from all the digital games I have to make this semester.

Here are some backgrounds I tried to make for The Dictator:

And a walkcycle for the main character:

HeroNet

I developed this game with a great group of people during the Nordic Game Jam last weekend, where we had 48 hours to make a game. Funny enough I went to the board games track thinking I didn't feel like spending a weekend with tired and grumpy programmers (an they probably didn't want to spend a weekend with a designer/artist looking over their shoulder waiting for stuff to get done). But somehow the game ended up more perhaps more digital than boardgamey.

HeronNet is an augmented reality game that requires you to sign up at heronet.dk in order to become a true reallife superhero. The goal is to accumulate either prestige or notoriety, depending on whether you wanted to be a superhero or a supervillain.

So the rules of the game is to sign-up and then create deeds on the website, which gives you an URL, which then in turn you need to spread out. The catch is that you need to spread it out anonymously, since superheroes can't expose their true identity. So perhaps you could do good deeds such as giving out free candy and leaving you URL at the candy, people would then go to the URL and give you either prestige or notoriety. If someone knows your true identity, they can go to the website and expose you, destroying your hero profile and collecting all your points.

Our goal with the game was to create a game, people were always part of (like Assasin) but without inducing fear and paranoia. And also make people do small good deeds around and spread a little happiness.

We didn't win anything at the game jam, which was expected I guess, since it was probably disqualified for not being a boardgame, but we had comments on the fact that it would a really interesting social experiment, so I suppose that's cool.

But anyway, humanity is suffering while I write this post, so go the heronet.dk and create your hero... NOW!

Neno, art

This is a fraction of the art created for Neno.

Assortment of objects to be found in the game (there was an average of around 20-25 unique objects in each level with five levels in total, which equals a lot of assets!). Some of the objects had animation and some were moving still images (or stationary)

The complete five levels in a coherent environment.

• The first level was a forest and floating circus level, with a girl being the go to point of interest as she would give you a new balloon.
• Second level is skyscraper islands with a bag lady as the balloon stall. She makes balloons out of plastic bags.
• Third level consists cliffs and has a mythological settings with objects appearing like pegasus, angels, centaurs and so on. Point of interest is Daedalus who is looking for his son Icarus. The player gets a metal balloon in order to move on.
• Fourth level is a space pirate battle. The balloon stall here is a sailor who has been thrown aboard due to his betrayal towards his crew. However he stole their underpants and has made balloons out of them.
• Fifth and final level is a futuristic space hotel. There is a robot seller who will give the boy a ticket home on the StarXpress when he has done what she wants him to.

Reflections on: Neno

Neno is the first game project I have worked on at Mediatechnology and Games (apparently just recently redubbed to Games). The game was made by team consisting of four people with a development phase of around two months, starting from mid-october 2010 and ending in mid-december 2010. My role in this team was designer, writer and artist.

Our vision was to create a browser game that was relaxing and explorative. The game is about a boy from space who has been accidently been left behind on earth by his parents and now he must, with the help of a balloon, make his way back to space. On his journey upwards, he must upgrade his balloon to a better one in order to be able to move all the way. Meeting all kinds of weird people with balloons, he helps them do whatever they needed to have done and they in return give him a new balloon.

The player is in charge of the wind and blows the boy around by mouse clicks. The main mechanic of the game is to collect objects, where objects that fly by their own power contribute towards updrift and objects that fall from the sky contribute to the opposite.

Positives:

• Consistent artstyle. I pretty much had my way with the art, as I was the artist, which caused a lot of work, but at the same time I made sure I was happy with it. The artstyle is obviously consistent throughout due to the fact that only I had a hand in it. However I do realise at the same time that especially the later levels lacked a polish that was there at the first couple of levels. This was due to the fact that a) time was an issue and so the later levels were slightly rushed. b) the time issue also manifested itself in the programming department which made me lose motivation as I could tell my graphics weren't implemented the way I wanted it to. But despite this, I'm still satisfied with the graphics and I think they tell the story well enough.
• Massive learning experience. I have learned a lot of do's and don't's during the development of this game. As this is the first game I've actually made with a team, I have obviously learned alot about team dynamics and how to communicate to a team consisting of people with very different backgrounds and tastes. Apart communication, one of the main things I have taken from this project is also an estimate of scale and project managing, which I feel is one of the main reasons why this game fell through (but more about that in the negatives section).
• A very different game. Neno is a game that is fairly difficult to pin into a genre, which was what we were going for. One of the things we discussed in the group at the beginnning of the process was, that we did not want to make a platformer or a similar very tested genre, as it was perhaps the easy way out. So we instead went out to do something that wasn't seen very often, and although the game completely fell through, I am still happy about our choice. Rather do something new and fail, than doing something old and do it ok (not great, as I believe it is not in our capabilities to do an outstanding platformer, or at least not in my capabilities as a designer(I generally have a problem with sidescrolling platformers, playing them and designing them)).

Negatives

• Disjointed design. The design of Neno is completely disjointed and renders the game slightly unplayable actually. Our first thoughts with the game was to make something that relied heavily on mechanic, but as we redesigned the game somehow we felt the need to insert a bit of narrative to explain goals and assert motivations. Another reason why narrative suddenly grew so big in our game was because the original plan was to not have a "level"-based progression but rather a fluid experience throughout the game without any "clear" goals, like a sandbox. However there were disagreements in the group whether this approach would be a good game or not and we ended up putting in levelling points and so on. This in turn sparked a lot of narrative and we suddenly had to explain why and what the player had to do in the game, which turned it into a fairly adventure-esque kind of game. But still the game had a very strange controlscheme where the player has limited control which works against the adventure-feel the game ended up having. All in all, a very disjointed game in many ways.
• Out of scope and nowhere near polished. This game started within scope, but suddenly exploded in all kind of directions very quickly. The narrative grew gigantic which caused the scripting to grow which in turn made our programmer very busy. The levels also grew from being one screensize wide and only scrolling vertically to several screen sizes wide and with wrapping, this is something that was felt in the programming department, and the wrapping didn't properly until the last week, which is not good enough. I'm probably most unhappy about this, as I feel we probably still could be in scope and provided a tighter experience if the level sizes were kept smaller, but our keyword of exploration and a narrow level structure didn't sit well with the other members. I think it also grew out of scale due to the fact that we weren't sure who we were designing this game for, which leads to the next point.
• In-team communication wasn't clear enough. This is quite possibly the culprit for our shortcomings in the game. We had not formulated our goals clear enough from the beginning which caused us to design for ourselves. Big mistake, as we had very different tastes as regards to what makes a good game. I like a sandbox experience and have a more toylike approach towards games compared to some of the other members who preferred a very competitive and challenge based experience. This caused the game to go from casual browser (which was very me) to a game that grew too big and heavy for a browser, although with time and redesign the concept would probably still have worked in some way. What we should have done was to formulate very clear goals, such as audience, technology, platform and our personal intentions. This would have focalized our game and contributed towards tighter design as we would be working towards the same goal.

Massive post, but the game itself is pretty massive compared to other stuff I have made.
The game is close to unplayable due to many factors. However I will treat this mainly as a learning experience and I am happy that we chose to do something difficult and try to think of completely new mechanics rather than relying on a set of used and tested one and modifying those. (Although I have absolutely no problem with people who do this as long as they do it well)

In development: The dictator (working title)

So this is the current AGS-project I'm working on at the moment.

The "enigmatic" ruler of a small tropical island banana republic is being overthrown by the people. Apparently they do not understand the true reason why the president has been flushing the state finances, being of course that he has taken it upon himself to personally protect the island assets in case of an emergency. Such as a hack-attack draining the island funds or war.
However the people do not know what is the best for them and is now trying to overthrow the president. Help him out!

The game is a traditional point-and-click adventure and development progress so far is: Design and puzzles are about 100 % complete, however everything else is kind of pending and I haven't started any scripting yet, as I don't have any art yet.

But... here's sketches of the unnamed president.