Design Document

We've been working on the components of the individual document elements this week.  We have a skeleton and a general idea on what our finished document will look like, it's just a matter of refining what we've written, concatenating it, and ensuring that the details and story don't conflict. I think we all have a solid view on the game world we've created and the look and feel of the environment, we all have strong opinions on certain directions, names, events and behaviours and when they don't "fit".  This reassures me that we're clear on exactly what we will be representing in the document.  My job for this week is to make the character biographies look really nice and finish writing up on the technical aspects of the game (ideal game engine, UI, representations etc.) Hopefully we can have a fairly final draft in place by this time next week.

J. Edgar Cordis

Human Scientist - J. Edgar Cordis

Excitable, passionate and incredibly intelligent.  Eidetic memory.  Is almost obssessed with the future of the human race.  Determined to ensure the success of future generations.  becomes progressively concerned that the Hybrid is aware of its situation and will escape before sufficient Ambrosia for both races can be harvested.  As a result, he begins the process of preparing for the worst early in the game.  The dialogue between Cordis and Animus will be designed to illustrate two factions, but not two races.

Week 7 - update

After a brief holiday from the blogosphere (read: absent minded), we've made some pretty extensive progress.  We've really narrowedn down the key elements to the game that we want to keep, and those we want to discard; with constant stripping and examination as we go on.  Ian came into the labs last week with an extensive imagining of the game world and narrative, keeping in tandem with the group ideas and formative concepts.  Since then we've refined and changed a lot of ideas, and even begun to construct the universe our game will reside in; names, races; ideoligies and setting are all flowing a little easier now.  I feel we've really gotten to grips with our ideas and all three of us can easily visualise the game-world, which helps when we're working seperately on areas of design.  I'll update a couple of blogs this week (to make up on lost time) with some of the juicier main character information and racial descriptors for the alien races involved in the game. 

Refinement

Ok, so thus far we've established quite a few convoluted game concepts.  The idea is now to try and focus what kind of experience we're looking for in the final product. The ethos of the game is centering around a dark survival horror thus far. Less shock value and more constant teetering threat.  Almost a constant Insidious atmosphere penetrated by falsehoods on the part of the shadowy corporation/organisation that the player is caged by.  We'll try and set individual goals for documentation going forward.

Character, Setting and Environment.

We've stumbled upon a great idea for our protagonist that we're keen to stick with now: The player will control a hybrid human/alien, but won't initially be aware of this fact.  We'll use intricate (and blunt) moral dilemmas and suppositions throughout the game that will force the player to think about his/her position, whilst subtly and gradually allowing the player to realise their origins.  We're thinking of adding an alternate timeline/ending based on choices made throughout the game.  This will have to be carefully considered as the player will initially and automatically side with the humans (obviously, unless they're some kind of alien sympathiser sociopath).  Sorting out ideas for how we'll approach story development. More on that soon.

The Beginning

Working on concepts for a game today, have thrown together some interesting ideas and we're getting close to forming something pretty exciting.  The approach is to build on a simple concept to give it something refreshing and attractive to the average gamer.  Using the idea of puzzle-based gaming, we've discussed (and discarded) quite a few ideas around goals, environment and some narrative.  Will try to hone a solid end-product vision in the next day or two so we can start getting to the grit of what we want to pitch.  It's surprisingly difficult to remain original and yet intuitive; engaging though.