Week 5 & 6: Random Narrative Concept and Space Shooter Assignment

By: Marcus Franzén / October 18, 2014 /

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During the fifth week, we were assigned the task to randomize a narrative and characters using They Fight Crime and Rory’s Story Cubes. They Fight Crime is a webpage that randomly creates two characters with different traits and Rory’s Story Cubes are a bunch of dice with images that you roll and then arrange in an order of your own choosing. After doing that, you attempt to make up a story involving all the images in that order. The group I was going to work with was unfortunately split before finishing the project, so I had to start from scratch alone. I kept the game concept the group had agreed upon, which was a point and click adventure. I did however, reroll the characters and narrative, and ended up with a mad scientist traveling to another world. In this case, a fantasy world. The idea was that the significant difference in the environment would make for interesting interactions in the game. Unfortunately, I was unable to finish the concept on time, due to the reduced time for working and the fact that I was left to work alone. A learning experience, and a reason to always keep the communication within the group.

During the sixth week we were put in groups and tasked to create a space shooter based on two randomly selected keywords given to us by the teacher. The criteras and restrictions for the space shooter were as follows:

The game must be in 2D, have a minimum of one projectile, a minimum of 3 power-ups and have a high-score counter. The game must have a scene, be it scrolling or static. The game must have no gravity (hence it’s called a ”space” shooter), it should use no online connection, and must use PC controls. Co-op and multiplayer is optional, but singleplayer is the focus. The time to create the game must not exceed 10 weeks.

Our words were ”intimate” and ”supernatural”. We started brainstorming and came up with the idea of a person inside a maze trying to solve an internal conflict. The game would be a top-down exploration based space shooter, except without the shooting. You would be equipped with a ball that would light the area around it. Throwing the ball would be our projectile. Pieces of the story would begin to show as you explored. That’s as far as we got.

This idea has now been scrapped. We found it difficult to further develop the idea, so we started from scratch. This time we have the concept of a druid defending a forest from an evil force. The ”intimate” part we interpreted as his home, the forest, and that he is connected to it in a strong way since he is able to wield its magic. The ”supernatural” part is obvious. Our druid uses magic. Nature-based magic to be precise. We have yet to decide on a default projectile, but we have the idea of combining attacks, similarly to Magicka, in order to achieve different effects.