#nzgdc

We'll be at the NZGDC Indie Games Showcase on Thursday from 7 to 10pm! 

(I know I didn’t post the final illustration from the previous post but things happen and get delayed haha) 

It’s been about three weeks into my new project (originally dubbed Project: Cards) so I’m just quickly going to do a few posts catching up on the process starting with Week One!

WEEK ONE

Coming back with fresh minds from a small holiday break, the class got back into the game dev mode and got to work on iterating and ideating new ideas. 

Our list came down to the following: 

- “Can teleport to kill location.” First Person Shooter. - “One time use spell card game” RPG Battle System. - “Fetch quest to fight boss as a pig fighting a cow.” Brawl game. - “Save the stunt man.” Minimum cost game.  - “Inside the bag of the video game hero.” Inventory Management System.

Most of us were pretty keen on working on the project all together once again, as half the class were going to a conference in Auckland called NZGDC (best week of 2018 for me!) which meant we would be away from project for a week which could cause a lot of scoping problems. Another was that we really couldn’t decide on one idea (even ideating to put the RPG system and the Pig game together). The end result was six people on “Project: RPG Card Game” and “Project: Teleportation Killer”. 

With our teams down, our next step was to plan and give out the roles that were going to be needed to create the game:

Along with creating a list of team Norms we were required to follow within the group we continued onto processing the idea down into a scope-able game that would be entertaining enough to play with a visual style that would draw the players in (pun intended!). 

THE IDEA: 

“A teenager at High School must participate in card battles created by his Classics Teacher in order to gain more powerful cards to overcome the Final Boss and achieve success in becoming the most powerful card player in the class.”

So the gameplay focuses on the card game created by the Classics teacher at highschool, created to educate his students in the ancient Greek gods in a way that would be fun and entertaining for the kids.

THE THEME:

Something that seemed pretty clear from the beginning of our ideation was the idea of doing something Mythical based, originally we focused on Roman Gods and eventually moved to the Greek gods instead which gave us our basis for the visual theme of our game.

Onto the start of production! 

WEEK ONE CONCEPT ART:

One of the first challenges that I faced was to find the art style we were wanting for our game aesthetic. Because of the teenage theme, I was interested in playing with a fun and almost over the top comic style- ultimately steering me towards my favorite comic of all time “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”

(Scott Pilgrim is created by Bryan Lee O’Malley and is my ultimate comic book favorite in the entire world). With this in mind I set to work on creating some concepts in my own style of Scott Pilgrim that suited me a little better. 

In order to create it into my own version of the style, I played around with different eye looks, hairstyles and focused on colour amongst the lineart instead of the classic black outline that Scott Pilgrim goes for, it was really just a guide line to help me in finding a style I felt was what I wanted to go for, for the game. 

I realized that I had added a little too many variations on the boys character sheet and did a little less for the females, (we decided on at least 7 for each gender) 

As you can see the theme became more prominent with the female iterations of the concept art, as I began incorporating props and accessories that would push their role playing to an “understandable to the player” level.

That was the end of Week One!

Today was the first day of NZGDC. In the morning I got to the Skytower not knowing exactly where it was. I ended up going to the casino before finding the convention center. Once I got there I got my battle pass lanyard and found a friend from second year and hung out with him for a bit. Then the Limbus team showed up and I joined there circle. Niagara VFX in UE4.20 was the talk for the morning. Because of demand, the GDC organizers had a secondary, less advertised sign up section. Because of this I was backfill and would get let in if there was space after the VIPs.

It was interesting but I was tired from waking up so early. I took quite a few notes and copied as many material graphs as I could onto the little pad paper from skycity.

Friday was the last day of NZGDC18. It was a lot of fun and really interesting to see the state of the industry Ive been studying in a broader context that's greater than the little white room Ive been in for two years at the top of my uni tower. This post is part two because the notes from Wednesday are at uni and I’m home for the weekend. I’ll do part one later.

UPDATE 8 Kiwi Game Starter & the New Zealand Game Developer’s Conference (2016)

September 15, 2016

Seed of Life is a meditative game about sacred patterns.

Catch up on what the game is in this post.

Seed of Life was a finalist for the KGS scholarship award!

The winners - two wonderful colleagues of mine; Matthew and Cynthia - went on to win the scholarship award with their games Caves and Ten Thousand Coins.

The winners for the funding streams were two other colleagues of mine; the peeps behind Lost Goblin and Team Ninja Thumbs for their games Goblins of Elderstone and Grabity.

Also, props to one last finalist; the game Interdimensional Llama by Team Llama - a delightful little puzzle game by a lovely student team from Wellington.

It was a packed week in Auckland!

I spoke at #NZGDC16 about editor extensions, game design, and being a one-person indie game dev

The room was packed! (Yikes!)

The talk basically glossed over these blog posts (scroll down to “Additional Links”) I had already written while exploring why such decisions were not only helpful but necessary in exploring my game’s possibility space (and making it without taking forever!)

I just kind of riffed. It was a very open, self-centered talk about Seed of Life and what I went through to make it (making it, still). What I had hoped to get across was how I discovered something unique with my game concept and how I attempted to explore it - implying that you too should look for what’s special about your game and try to explore it by writing tools that help you do so.

I think it went well!

Seed of Life was live-streamed during NZGDC

Here’s a shot of Cynthia playing the game! (Ooh, that glare on the tv T__T)

All the while, the game was being streamed live to twitch (here’s my twitch page) with screenshots being posted to my twitter (several screens if you scroll down!) in real time - a large part of what my talk was about.

TODO: Archive the videos to YouTube!

Conclusion

After NZGDC, we celebrated into the night. It was here that many memorable and open conversations took place with several endearing people across the ANZ game development scene. I feel that it was here that I got to properly take in what just happened, and it solidified my enthusiasm and excitement for completing and releasing Seed of Life - which is hopefully not all too far away.