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.
Soon finished with the project plan
This week I and Simon have worked a lot with the project plan for the project. Finally it’s nearing completion, only minor things to add now. Not so much to say about that, except that there is a lot to think about when planning the project.
The next thing to do is to start describing and developing our 20 chosen ideas further. This we have planned to do next week, but we will probably start doing that tomorrow and during the weekend, as soon as the project plan is finished.
Final ideas
Today we came up with the final ideas for our list with 100 game ideas. We used a common method to come up with ideas, mind-mapping. In the middle of a paper we wrote “game idea” and from that word we wrote words that are connected to it, like setting, mechanic and rules. From those words we wrote words that were connected to them, and so on. This could go on forever, but fortunatly a sheet of paper has limited size, and we stopped writing new words when we reached the edges of the paper. We now had a bunch of words connected to each other. Then we tried to just look at these words and come up with game ideas. Since all words were somehow connected to games, it wasn’t very hard to think of games. The hard part was to come up with something new, something that we hadn’t already thought of. Luckily we are two persons doing this project and we can discuss seeds to ideas so that they can become something more. By just stating something that one thinks of, the other can then fill out more, and suddenly an idea is formed. This we did. We both got a lot of seeds for ideas from the mind map, and by discussing them together they formed to ideas that were better and we could write them down to our list.
This week we have also started to work on our project plan and we will be doing that during this week. Aside from that the next step is to choose 20 of our 100 ideas to develop further.
