Space Shooter Assignment: Dia de la Piñata
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Our last assignment in the course was to, in teams of six, create a concept document for a game based on two keywords with the following restrictions and requirements: Restrictions:
Requirements:
Our assigned words were “Dia de Muertos” and “Snacks”. During the next 5 weeks we would make a concept document, a playable paper prototype, a one-page design document, a personal report and pitch our game for our class and the 2nd- and 3rd-years. We started off by dividing out roles for the project and brainstorming about what we wanted to do. As producer it was my job to organize and document our meetings and make executive decisions. We quickly started putting together a description of our target audience, aesthetic goals, dynamics and mechanics. To simplify formulating the mechanics I created a list of objects and their properties and a table with the relationships between these objects like we did in our first Space Invaders-assignment. Our first concept was a gravedigger who’d accidentally unleashed malicious spirits on his/her hometown. As we did research on the Dia de los Muertos we found out that there was a tradition to put out foods for the family spirits. So the player would pick up candy and feed it to the spirits by shooting it and so appease them. We planned for three levels with a boss fight between each level. We later added a power-up combination system where the player could either activate the power-up they had or wait for another one which would create a stronger power-up. After presenting our paper prototype the feedback we got was that it was not communicated clearly enough to the player what was happening and that it seemed like we were only going for meeting the requirements and nothing more. This may depend on the fact that we got a little stuck thinking about the word “shooter” and failed to have a larger idea and then fit it around the shooting mechanic. It was correct, the concept did feel somehow uninspired. After asking for ideas to remedy this we were advised to scratch it all if it didn’t feel right and try again. So that was what we did, with two weeks left on the project. With the rather unsophisticated method of “keep thinking about ideas until something feels right” we came up with a new idea about a possessed Piñata that would go on a revenge-spree on the town by wrecking the Dia de los Muertos-preparations. The piñata would eat candy to grow in size and thus be able to wreck larger objects. It could destroy those objects by either shooting candy projectiles which could be modified by picking up special Dia de los Muertos-foods or use melee-attacks which could be upgraded with skill points earned by completing levels. We re-wrote the concept documents and lead art made new concept art during the course of about 5 days and then pitched the new idea. The pitch was put together and held by yours truly and got a fairly positive reception.
After that it was all one-page design, putting together and finishing up the concept document and writing the personal report. For those interested, there is a dropbox-link to both our concept document and two versions of the one-page design here. ———————————————————————————————————————————– Looking back at the project I feel like the glaring mistake we made in the beginning was to go ahead with an idea that felt ‘alright but meh’-ish to us, kind of like starting to paint a character that looks anatomically off because you want to get to the fun part with the colours and cool effects. The group roles didn’t really work out that well for us and I felt like we should’ve used the roles as formulated in Ernest Adam’s workshop instead as they were more practical and would probably have given a more equal division of work. The concept challenge we did for Adam Mayes came in handy as the approach was quite similar. What differed most was the template for the pitch document. The one we were given by Marcus was much more focused on demonstrating gameplay and using mock-ups and gameplay scenarios to convince the audience, which made sense given that we had five weeks this time around as opposed to one. All in all it has been a valuable and inspiring course and I look forward to the upcoming courses next year. Cheers!  |
