Game Dev Update

Okk so I’ve been meaning to post on here for a long while again but here it is.
So much has changed since my last post the huge group we were in has broken up and we’re now in smaller groups. our group is basically the same group as it was before (GS8-2) with one addition Ryan Hogg. Over the past few weeks not much progress had been made what so ever, that combined with the fact that me and a few other members of the team were starting to lose faith in the game its self was starting to make for low group moral. But within the past two sessions our group has really pulled together and produced a lot of work up until now we’ve got a pretty detailed first draft what’s going to happen during the game play as in what events will happen and what story will be involved. We’ve still yet to finalise the dialogue but have got a story board up and running. All of our characters are named and where currently researching how games developers create the feeling of pressure on the play and looking at how we can incorporate these methods in our game. Another area that we looked at is what our character will be able to do what the enemies will look like , how they will attack and what how many variations there will be. Progress is finally being made and moral is at an all time high. Each time we meet up we set a task for each member of the group to do for the next session. If things carry on at this rate our game will be all we want and more.

Week 2

Sorry for the lateness of this post my internets been down
So this week was not the best.
Upon the whole group getting together we managed to come up with just about nothing.
Throughout the 2 hour session we spent the first hour and a half just loosening up around each other again, also allot of the enthusiasm that was there last week failed to make an appearance.
So eventually we managed to split the group into three temporary sections art, story and research.
These groups will later be re-looked at and changes will be made where possible.
But as our groups set off we soon realised that the art group couldn’t get to work until the research side of things had been done so these two groups merged.
On the research side (I was in this group) we split up into teams of two and looked at what visual aspects we would like the game to have by searching images in an attempt to make a number of mood boards. The areas we looked at where city environments, main character, sword types, possible antagonist concepts.
Despite our attempts pick up the pace and get some work done we didn’t come up with much.
The story side of the group consisting of four people came up with the bare bones of a story involving the main character his brother, sister, mother, father and the sword however with the two sides of the whole group only reuniting for a brief period at the end of the lesson and everyone eager to get home and rest not much was discussed and therefore not much was decided on.
The group was supposed to meet up on Thursday to continue with the development of the game however only three people (including me) out of the 16-18 in group actually showed up and when we did couldn’t get a room to work in due to poor organisation on our part.
So Thursday was a total waste of time.
My personal thoughts:
Honestly Wednesday was a big big letdown I was hoping for an eventful day filled with passion and new ideas being brought to the table but there was nothing, nothing at all most of the day was spent going over what we did last week. It seems as though all of my original fears about merging the two groups are rapidly becoming true which is disappointing because in week one I was convinced the new group was going to be bigger and better.
Ideas within the group are becoming stale people seem to have no passion about the game and are settling for decisions that their not exactly happy with (me included).
Kelly wants a design brief from us in a few weeks and I don’t think we can pull it off.
I’m so frustrated because if we can all just pick up the pace and put in some effort (by some I mean LOTS and LOTS) this game could be so good but I’m starting to think that the groups too big (pleasing 18 people isn’t easy).
At the moment I’m seriously considering starting over with a new smaller group on an entirely new game.

Week 1

ok so this week allot has taken place the two games student groups GS8-1 and GS8-2(us) have decided to work to get her and all produce a game together. GS8-2 already had a number of ideas for a game and on presenting them to the other group every ones jumped on board. at first I personally was a little concerned about the join but not against the idea because of the possibility of the our two groups simply being one group by name and there still being some separation between the two but after our first session together the groups merged extremely well leading to us producing even better ideas.

Moving on to the actual games development progress. the game that we want to make is a 2.5D side scrolling game that has fast pasted free running style moment (similar to that of Mirrors Edge 2D) and a fast pasted fighting (like Demon Blade)

Decisions that have been made thus far are:

• our target audience is young males between the ages of 14-20
• we would like our main character to be a tall slim man similar in appearance to a standard anime character.
• He is highly trained in combat with ability to run and jump off parallel walls to scale buildings.
• In order not restricted the character to simply always doing the right thing (being good) we have decided on him being an anti hero and a ruthless thing at that.
• The environment that he inhabits is a dark a gritty city based slightly in the future
• Our main character caries a large (over sized) unique sword of great power that he drags behind him when running.

In terms of story what we have thus far is not set in stone but here's the general idea.

• 
  Our character and his brother and sister are raised as almost royalty taught to be ruthless and fearless trained to survive by the best warriors from all around his entire life. When the time comes for his father to hand down the sword to one of his children (his sword in the game) he selects our protagonist. The characters brother and sister filled with jealousy band together to forcefully take the sword from him.
• The rest of the game revolves around our characters siblings attempting to take the enchanted sword by sending henchmen after him, leading him into traps and fighting him themselves.
  
  So that’s everything we have up until now.
  Because our new larger group still has separate collage time tables we have arranged an out of ours meet on Thursdays 9am till 2pm to discuss ideas.
  
  Also along with this blog I want to create a Vlog collection to track my thoughts on the game development.