Prototypes are GO!!!

sorry for the strange Thunderbirds reference, it just popped in there.

Well, we gave our presentations for game prototypes last week, and it all went very well. We had lots of awesome concept art to show off, a nicely polished game design and backstory, and a brief game prototype demonstrating some of the gameplay. We received some very positive comments, and also some very constructive criticism, which we’ve been incorporating this week. We’re now fully into Alpha development.

This week, and I mean pretty much all of this week, has been pretty much dedicated to level design, refining some of the game-play choices, and setting specific puzzles for each level. It’s been a rough week, with not a lot of sleep, but I’m really glad we’ve gotten through it, as we’ve refined the amount of content we’re going to make for the game (greatly reduced it, but we now have a reasonable amount given the project duration), and condensed the puzzle ideas we had so that each level is a growing mixture of several puzzle elements, which makes for much more interesting levels (I hope – we’ll see in a week or so once we’re testing them in the game!).

Now that we’ve got all the levels defined and on paper, the artists have been given the task of creating basic 3D models of them, and hopefully this time next week we’ll be playing them in the game. My current project for the weekend is to re-visit an old GameState manager project I did last year, and get that working in Gamebryo. That way we can import each level model into the game, and have people building all levels in the one project. Also, if we have the basics of our menu system in place, Level Select etc, it will make it feel like much more of a game.

Anyways, it’s progressing, we’re receiving lots of constructive reports from people at school and teachers on how the game’s looking, and the amount of content we’re aiming for (I must admit I got a bit over-zealous in my initial game design – live and learn I guess).

I’ll see if I can put up our demo apps here, and maybe a Youtube vid of our presentation video. If we can get that going, I’ll post an update with links to that.

Cheers,
Craig

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