SynergyBCT

Yesterday we were fortunate enough that Charles happened upon us while we were having a group meeting and after we explained our project he was able to provide us with a wealth of insight and reference material. Plenty to think about and work from in order to ensure our project works out well.

Changes, deadlines and copyright strikes?

As we progress, I feel like we are really evolving our ideas for this project; the initial ideas we had weren’t necessarily scraped but we did realize that we had to make some changes;

Upon chatting with Laurant, who is also a big fan of the movie we draw inspiration from (bonus points from me!) quickly was able to identify that we were pretty much remaking that world we see on screen in a different format. Understanding this we agreed that yeah, we were very much using that idea as a platform to start off but reassured him that we were merely using the platform to take off from (no pun intended).

And yes, we always have planned to change, but I do believe that we should keep some elements from our source inspiration. The pig flying a red plane is surely iconic and is something that just about anyone who has seen Porco Rosso will be able to recognize. We can’t copy that as far as I am concerned to due us not wanting a copyright infringement to kick start our careers, but using the Mediterranean like setting mixed with a few influences from various cultures would most definitely do us good. In fact, one of the many sprint goals we have is to have phase one of our vertical slice done by September in order to make a deadline given to us by Laurant so we can demo our hard work in New Caledonia.

The development side of things.

Currently, I am sudo-managing two and a half guys whilst doing my current workload, and admittedly its a bit harder than I expected as I know I have my own deadlines and goals to meet but to also have to provide sketches for the modeling team, work on texturing, managing the layout and white boxing is quite the handful to juggle. I’d like to thank Max for taking over the management time to time, as it does free up a bit of my mind to focus my attention on my own tasks at hand. It does really help me out a lot. 

From the time freed up, I was able to sketch up some more “junkplane” ideas that we can work with going forth, with the idea of building a seaplane from scratch taking a more grounded idea that seemed a bit more plausible. So here’s this boat that we’ve kinda wedged and engine and ducted tape some wings on to it. It flies!, I swear! is the kind of approach that I took when drawing up the rough concepts. More development is needed as the idea isn’t too concrete at the moment. As my time is currently occupied doing;

Character Concepts;

Admittedly, our first character is nothing too good to come by, but seeing as Kevin as we call him is quite literally the good two-shoes character that is super friendly and fairly generic… I’ll give him a pass for now.

I’ll likely go back and give him an update whenever I can find the time to do so. In the meantime, I’ve already sketched up the concept for one of our other key characters; Steve who is grizzly old lighthouse keeper who is quite unfriendly towards others.

I’m not too fond of this character, I did sketch him up on less than an hour so quality and thought process behind the conscious decisions in making this character are lacking. That being said, I’m just glad he is no longer on my to-do list as I have quite a lot of things to texture over the next few days. Steve the grumpy old fart of a bulldog is now in the hands of the modeling team to be created.

There is one other thing I should blog about but honestly not much has been done to warrant a blog about it yet. That is the white boxing and layout out of the town in which I’ll likely cover whenever my next blog. Till then I’ll be closely working with our scriptwriter Jack in order to make sure everything in the town is where it needs to be and will likely revise the layout with him, as he would know whats best for the town.

With the semester coming to an end, and deadlines getting closer and closer, we have to write more and more ‘documentation’ blog posts to cover our behinds from the lecturers who loom over each of our projects. 

Character Woes.

Character development on my end has been fairly relaxed, with the process of our character simply going as follows;

A draft is produced, and a character is decided, in our example, I’ll take Kevin who is a bit of a meme because of how many versions of him there are.

“Kevin is the friendly face that you are first introduced to in the game prologue, he’s the guy that looks like he’d throw everything aside to help you out” 

So my first thought would have been, golden retriever, loyal and friendly right?

Oh dear lord, what is that?  This is the first draft of Kevin, friendly-looking? sure, but it looks like that dark entity that resides in the dark corner of your bedroom.

We quickly revised that made him appear to be more of a dog this time around.

But ultimately, we had to rework him again with the direction of the other characters in development. Compared to them, he seemed like he was from another game altogether which was not good for us. 

So this time, following the procedures for the other characters created, we made him look more human-like, whilst retaining the character design elements that made him, himself. 

The end results are a drastic improvement over what we had before, with Kevin becoming a well-dressed individual that looks very dependable and characteristically “stupid friendly”.

The eyes are put in engine, don’t judge me.

Now as nice as all of this is, I wished it didn’t take as long for it to have come to where it is now. Looking back at the 27-28 different versions of Kevin makes me wonder what the hell we were thinking sometimes. 

One last look back before moving on.

Since I have run out of things to talk about, let’s look back on this project overall and have a bit a critical review;

Things I liked about this project is the evolving nature of it, this project went from a plane building flight sim to a social-based adventure title with flight in a couple of months. The ideas generated for the group really reflects on the process of the project overall, and at times, it doesn’t feel like we are doing just a uni project but instead gives off more of a professional environment vibe when we are all on task and giving it our all. 

With that being said, I didn’t like how far we’ve moved off from the original idea. Call it developer’s remorse (like buyer’s remorse) or whatever, but I do look back often and wonder what would have happened if we kept the original darker themes that we had, as I do genuinely believe it would work better with the narrative we have. 

Overall project management has improved greatly, we’ve definitely been limited in scope due to bad time management in the past but this time around. We’ve definitely been able to keep on task whilst being able to reorganize and prioritize more urgent tasks rather than letting them drag us down like in the past.

Because why make 10 posts and spam someone else’s feed

I&P has been been a rollercoaster and an absolute clusterfuck of an idea that we had to mishmash and filter to get to where we are today. With that being said, it is an absolute meme that I loved being part of.

Learning

I’d say the greatest area of learning during this paper was definitely about player agency and expressionism. From this project, as well as other game design projects I have been a part of, expression seems to be a tricky aesthetic to implement properly. Expressionism arguably requires freedom, however, in a setting like a public space or an instanced video game experience, how much freedom can game makers really give the players without losing control and moderation.

It’s a tenuous balance to keep. Our team touched on this during the development of our game ‘Bard’ in 2018, but again in this paper, my experience has proven that expression can still be meaningful despite limitations being forced on it. 

I think in the case of Freyberg Heroes, the expressionism works because of humor. Personally, I feel that the creation process, despite actually really limited still allows players to add their own personal touch to their hero. This personal touch being a user’s unique sense of humor. They decide what combination of prompts and powers makes the funniest hero and release it to the world.

Process

Although I think we settled on a cool concept, the process should have been way smoother. Our end result was essentially an emergency reshuffle induced by weeks of Limbo caused by a lack of communication and planning amongst the team. Part of this is my fault as ‘team coordinator’, but I think there was a general lack of enthusiasm and wariness across the board which made teamwork hard. 

Week 4 for InP was mainly based around research for me as other members of my group (Max) worked on creating our program for our next playtest. We spoke to Ben on Monday and he gave us a few things to look into:

One was a board game that focused heavily on roleplaying, creating a narrative between different characters. He wanted to us to have a look at how they controlled the theme of the session which allowed participants freedom but still kept the story from devolving too far into random madness. 

Another example we looked into was work done by a previous BCT student Jenna Gavin. She had two projects that were useful to us as precedent for our idea. Cut And Paste was and interactive work that allowed participants to create a written work by selecting quotes from various authors and adding them to a larger script. Word Wars was another idea that caused players to fight over letters in order to create a longer word,  it showed a competitive take on the collaborative story telling we had been looking into so far.

Finally Ben also briefly mentioned Exquisite Corpse.  Exquisite Corpse is a drawing technique were participants would each draw part of a creature without looking at each others and combine them to create something weird. This idea might be used in our project to create a unique story narrative.

Yesterday we were fortunate enough that Charles happened upon us while we were having a group meeting and after we explained our project he was able to provide us with a wealth of insight and reference material. Plenty to think about and work from in order to ensure our project works out well.