Week 1: Group Meeting Minutes
The group meeting this week, Wednesday the 17th of February, is the first of our weekly meetings where we will dicuss what we have done so far, what needs to be done and ensure we are on schedule by creating weekly tasks and goals for us to achieve by the next meeting.
We have all so far been individually researching and sketching general ideas for the project. We have been exploring different styles and have begun to allocate out tasks to each of the group members. It appears as though we are all going to be doing quite a mix of different jobs in order to ensure that everyone has an even workload but we are balancing these tasks on each individuals preferences.
We as a group selected scenes and characters which we would like to work on. Some members have mainly characters to concept, whereas others have more scenes and assets, or a mismatch of both to suit individual preferences.
The first thing discussed in the meeting was our style. We have decided to go for a very stylised approach to our level. The map and assets are going to follow a low poly and hand painted style, reflecting games such as Ni no kuni, Kingdom Hearts and World of Warcraft. We are going to use very bright colours and due to the fantasy theme there will be lots of sparkly accessories and bright shrubbery. Our characters will follow the same bright colour scheme, but are going to be quite cartoony and have exaggerated proportions and features such as Disney characters. The cartoony characters will reflect on the comedy of the play and the somewhat irresponsible characters.
After we had come to a deicision on the style, the next major thing to discuss was our level mechanics. How the game will actually work and be interesting to the player. We have decided that our game will be set on a stage, where there is an audience who boos when the player makes incorrect decisions. As our game is set on a stage, we have decided that our props are going to be very theatrical, using a mix of quite nice detailed assets and a few comical cardboard cutout style assets for less important assets and background detail, as a nice addition to the theme and atmosphere of the game. We had initially discussed a Telltale games type play style, where the narrative is the main feature of the game, however we have now decided to add more player interactivity into the game and make it so that the players are able to walk through the environments and collect items needed to progress the story.
This is a quick sketch up of our new level plan. The purple boxes are the stages, and the player has to navigate through pathways to get to the next stage, once a stage has been completed the next stage will be unlocked, and the player has to then travel through the forest or behind the scenes to find the next stage. Players will also be required to travel back through the forest, to pick up items or speak to NPCs to trigger the next stage or complete actions. For example, Puck may have to travel through the forest to find the flower to use on the characters for his magic and spells.
For now, our action plan is not set in stone as we are all still experimenting and brainstorming ideas. However we have already started concepting and have a good idea of where to go next. Our plan for the next week includes to carry on concepting and sketching as we have done so far, but begin to start fitting our designs into the style we have chosen and produce more final and presentable ideas which show our thoughts in an accurate way.