Meeting #5

Well we are finally starting to move forward. We made a lot of progress this week. On the art side, the artists came up with an art style and a theme. Its going to be a steam-punk theme with a non-realistic look. The concept work looks cool, especially some of the enemies I saw. I’m excited to see this all come together on the screen.

On the design side, we solidified some of core gameplay mechanics. We still have some enemy and weapon design left to do but thats about it, until we start designing the levels.

On the programming side, the prototype is moving along nicely. Brandon is kicking ass and hopes to have a first version ready by next weeks meeting. Bill is working on the core engine and is also making a ton of progress, including work on resource management, asynchronous asset loading, some custom pipeline components, and the basic render.

Prototyping is something we are focusing on this time around. We want to get our key gameplay ironed out as soon as possible. To do this, we want to get the game in the hands of a lot of people quickly, so we can get feedback and start iterating ASAP. We’re developing the prototype independently of the core engine to get it up and running quickly.

Meeting #4

We have a game idea … again ;-) In the process of refining our idea from last meeting, we pretty dramatically changed course.

We spent most of the meeting debating one key mechanic – the rail system. In the end we decided to cut it and go in a different direction, to achieve a more fluid navigation and control system. With that decision made, we adjusted and modified a few of our ideas to better fit the new direction. We did this by creating some rules that our game will follow. Here are those rules:

1. The game is a shooter. The focus is on shooting enemies to achieve a high score.
2. The game is played in a tube that has both an inner and outer surface.
3. The player has the ability to switch from the inside to the outside of the tube and vice versa at will.
4. Speed is not controlled by the player (he just controls left/right movement).
5. Its a level based game, which has a difficulty progression. Levels are completed by killing a certain number of enemies.
6. A binary color scheme is used to denote the inside and outside of the tube (all enemies inside are one color, all enemies outside are a different color; the energy strip also follows the binary color scheme).
7. There is a special meter that is filled by driving over the energy strip. Each time the special meter is filled, your points multiplier for kills will increase.
8. At predetermined point thresholds, the player will be awarded extra men and bomb power-ups.
9. There is no co-op or multiplayer.
10. There are environmental obstacles, such as walls.

As you can see it’s going to be a pretty crazy shooter game. The player will be continuously racing down a tube, while shooting enemies, collecting “energy”, and avoiding obstacles; all while “jumping” between the inside and outside of the tube.

Meeting #3

We have a game idea!!! It took two meetings this week (we had to break a tie) and there is still a lot that needs to be fleshed out, but we finally have a high level concept for the game.

We had our regular weekly meeting on Wednesday. There were 4 game ideas then. Everyone presented their vision for the game ideas at the start of the evening. It was interesting to see how people had evolved the original concepts. For instance, one of the ideas from last week was a top down shooter with a special twist. This concept got morphed into a story driven epic by one person and a multi-player racing game by another.

After the presentations, we voted. Two of the ideas were pretty clear front-runners, so we dropped the others. But we were unable to come to a unanimous decision on our favorite. We spent some time discussing the merits of both ideas, but were unable to find any real middle ground. We decided to sleep on it and reconvene at the end of the week with some final arguments.

At the special Friday meeting, the decision came amazingly quick. A few people had done some further work on one of the ideas, and the direction they were taking it in, was amazing. Its action packed, looks visually crazy, and should be a ton of fun to play.

So with the game idea in hand, the real fun begins. For the next meeting everyone will begin to scope & refine the high concept into a “realistic DBP entry” and decide how they want to contribute to the development. Next week we will present the game idea on the blog, so stay tunned for a first glimpse of International Conspiracy’s game idea.

Meeting #2

8 game ideas were brought to table. There was a lot of variety in the submissions and some really interesting and unique ideas. It was a blast hearing people present their ideas and seeing what they thought would make interesting XBOX Live games. I really enjoyed some of the “conceptualization screen shots”!

We spent a little over 2 hours just going through the game ideas. Someone would present for like 10-15 min and we would discuss. Discussion focused on what we thought were the strengths of the idea and how to maybe further capitalize on those.

At the end we decided we would take a vote to see what people were feeling. 4 games pretty clearly rose to the top. We decided that for next meeting everyone would write 1 page about each of the four game ideas. This page would be “their take” on the game – what they thought was cool about the idea and how they would turn it into a fun Xbox Live game.

Meeting #1

We held our first team meeting today. We hold weekly team meetings to get everyone on the same page and discuss big ticket items. We don’t have a game idea yet, so we spent most of the meeting brainstorming ideas. We set a goal of finalizing the game idea by the end of the month. Most of us are in middle of Beta in our real life jobs, so it’s going to be hard to focus on Dream Build Play in the short-term.

The brainstorming process we followed was very free form. People basically threw out ideas and others built on them or evolved them slightly. We took some basic notes and tried not to dwell on any one idea for too long. At the end we reviewed and determined which ideas we liked. We wrote those down and will take them to the next stage.

The next stage is what we call a 1-pager. It’s basically a brief overview of the game idea written down, with a conceptualization screen shot. These screen shots were really helpful last time around in quickly getting other people up the speed on the idea. We will be reviewing all the 1-pagers next week and hopefully narrow down on a few we like to develop even further.