Last post

The presentations for the project have been held and the only thing left to do is to deliver the final report. The whole afternoon was used for the presentation. It felt a bit tiresome, but it was interesting to see what the others had been doing for their projects.

This will be the last post for this blog and I will end it by saying thanks to all who have read my writings. It has been a both fun and sometimes difficult project, but I have a learned a lot of useful things that I will carry with me and use in future projects.

/Pelle

Presentations finished

The PowerPoint presentations for the project have been completed and the presentation itself will be held on wednesday. The only thing left to finish is the final project report, but the deadline for that is a few days after the presentations. However, I and Simon aims to have it finished the same day as the presentations. So far it looks like we’ll manage that.

Then there is another presentation day about a week later. There a few thing that needs to be done for that presentation. We have already made some information and pictures for a folder, but most our work right now is focused on the first presentation day.

Nearing the end

The project is nearing its end and work have begun on the final report. The design documents for the 2 final game ideas are pretty much complete and a playtest was held yersterday. The work left, besides the final report, is to summarize all playtests and draw some conclusions from that, and of course make presentations of the whole project.

Another flash prototype

Our other prototype for our game idea Troglodyte Mania, we decided to do in flash. The reason for this was that we could see it as a smaller game in flash and we already have some knowledge of how to work with the program, since we already have ceated a flash prototype for our first selected game idea. The few images that will be in the prototype we will make in photoshop. It will not look pretty, but that doesn’t matter since it’s only a prototype. We have only a few days to make the prototype so it will probably not have all the functionalites we want, and it will probably also have a number of bugs, but hopefully it will suffice to test if the idea works and if it has any fun value.

Second game selected for prototyping

This week we have started to work with prototypes for the second of our final ideas. We are going to make 2 different prototypes for this game too, as we did with our first final idea. Simon has written more about the actual process, so head over to Simon’s blog if you want to read more about it.

Prototyping

We have started to create prototypes for one of our games, God Sports. One prototype made in flash and one with pen & paper. So far we have created one of the events in the flash prototype and two of the events for the pen & paper prototype. We have thought about five events for the game, but we’ll porbably only have time to do prototypes for two of them. The prototypes are quite crude and simple, but hopefully they will suffice for getting an initial example of how the game might be played. When we have both the flash version and the physical prototype ready, we’ll try to have some playtesters trying out the game. This will give us some indication on what works and what doesn’t, and if the experience will be similar or not between the different prototypes. Even if we don’t have time during this project to iterate and improve the game, it will still be good to know what needs to be imroved if we ever want to continue working with it.

Background research

This week we have been doing some background research for our remaining ideas. We have tried to find existing games that are similar to our ideas, both digital and non-digital games. So far we haven’t found that many games with similar game mechanics as we have in mind, but some themes are definitely common among games. For example, one of our ideas is Egyptian themed, and we found a lot of games with that theme in all kinds of genres and platforms.

We are also looking at existing and real facts in areas that are relevant to our game ideas. For our Egyptian themed game we have looked at information about ancient Egypt, the pyramids and the pharaohs.

We will be going to Luleå over  the weekend and after that we will begin creating prototypes for 2 of the ideas.

5 ideas live on

Today I and Simon had a presentation of our 10 ideas for Annakaisa. We had a voice chat in Skype and she had the powerpoint presentation so she could follow. It worked fairly well I think, and we could get imediate feedback on the ideas. After our presentation, 5 ideas have been selected for further development. These are:

• Cheop’s curse
• God Sports
• Troglodyte Mania
• Eye of the Rectangle
• Troll Mere

We had already started with some background research on some ideas that we thought would be selected. One that was not selected was Monster Maker, but that was probably good, since we found 22 existing games that have the words Monster Maker in their title.

10 ideas chosen

10 ideas of our 20 are now chosen and we have started to do some more work on them. We will also make powerpoint presentations for the game ideas. We will write more about this tomorrow, but it might be on Simon’s blog.

I found a webpage with some useful things to think about when pitching an idea. Here is the page. Step 4 and 5 caught my eye. Step 4 is about keeping 3 versions of the idea ready for  presentation. One that takes 5 seconds, one that takes 30 seconds and one that is about 5 minutes. The 5 second version can always be used when presenting the idea and then if the listener have become interested in just a few seconds you can always present more. Step 5 is about testing the pitch so that you can refine  and improve it.

Project plan accepted

Our project plan has been accepted and we have green light to continue with the project. We have also sent in our list with the 20 game ideas. 10 of these we will develop further and make ready for presentation, which is the next step of this project. We have also read a bit more in the book “Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games” by Tracy Fullerton, Christopher Swain and Steven Hoffman. It contains a lot of useful things to think about when designing a game.