This week began with our pitches for what games would be made in the game design class this year. Over half the week was spent on this, and I did present my own project with the working title "Tidal Melody." I prepared a presentation, even getting some concept art from my classmate Jamie for visuals, and gave my presentation on Wednesday. In short the game was a sidescroller metroidvania set underwater on an ocean world. The main gameplay innovation I presented was the idea of oxygen compacity. A sort of timer forcing the player to restart from a certain spot on the map when it ran out, encouraging fast movement and rout optimization. But unfortunately, I could not assemble a team and the project was scrapped. Following the majority of the class joining various projects, I elected to Join the "Forest game" team. Obviously, this was a working title.
The game was Greenlit on Wednesday, and so Thursday we had our first design meeting to establish the base framework of the game. Our project head Kayla had already wanted to focus gameplay around resource gathering and management, as well as interacting with the residents of a town. The whole concept heavily inspired by games such as Stardew Valley and Spirit Farrer. With this in mind, we decided on this system for gameplay and moved onto story and themes. When pitched, the game already had some basic themes of a much darker world covered up by a rather cutesy happy story and art style. We leaned into this heavily, discussing the world history and setting alongside how the player will see this and how it all affects them.
Over the weekend, I took the time to setup a google drive folder for all our text documents, and filled several things in with it. First, I digitized all my notes from the first design meeting to have some archive of the ideas shared and decisions made. Second, I created two templates for writers and designers to use. The first was a location template, including all the basics alongside history landmarks and resources. And the second was a character template, once again covering all the basics that we needed. Both will be up for review in the coming week.
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