For the first week we started out roughly defining a theme and / or feeling for the game that we wanted to make sure we keep on our minds during our individual prototyping and research before out first meeting. The first meeting went really well, we went over a huge list of mechanical ideas that we had put together previous during last class in hopes of boiling it down to a select few to mess around with. We actually happened to have the meeting outside, which was strangely coincidental with the loose theme that we had come up with; that of a nature focused vision.
There were two different game ideas that we discussed about working on, a game about growing trees and the other about a little girl navigating through a forest with the help of magical seeds to overcome obstacles. Chris had already started work on the tree growing game so I decided to get a start on the girl in the forest idea, which I had actually brought up during the meeting and has been an idea I’ve been kicking around for a couple years. I jumped into prototyping the forest girl game on Saturday, made some good progress and brought what I had into out work meeting today. I wasn’t feeling particularly enthralled with my prototype, but was satisfied with it considering the amount of time I’d put into it wasn’t too huge.
We all discussed the tree game and it was immediately evident that it was what we were the most excited about, ideas shooting out left and right. Charles helped ground us down by having us answer the questions for the first challenge, which really helped us focus on what we want for the base prototype, as well as looking to the future with it. Our intent for the game is to create an ever changing environment that the player is in and tend to their trees and grow a large and healthy forest. We want there to be a high focus on random events, such as a storm or even a forest fire, that the player must react to in order to preserve their precious trees. Through this changing environment and random occurrences there will be bizarre and strange results from certain events that will instill a sense of discovery as the player encounters them. One such example would be a forest fire that ravages your carefully tended trees, only to reveal a new species of tree to rise from the ash, one that has flame instead of leaves.
Obviously a lot of this is higher level, down-the-road stuff, but we have outlined a base prototype that we aim to accomplish before reaching for the first challenge. Along with the base prototype we will prepare several other prototypes to build, separately, off of the base prototype to try and explore other exciting areas that we talked about in our excited frenzy of a discussion about the game. These include some sort of combat system to have between other AI or player characters growing their own forests, an in depth focus on selecting genes for newly grown trees and a few other wide-eyed ideas.
All in all its been a great first week, we all are very excited with the direction that we’ve found and very hopefully for where and how far we can take all of these ideas and plans we’ve thought of.
J. Cody Winchester 