Three weeks into the project and everything seems to be going smoothly. The excitement and involvement is at its peak, with all the members doing a great and better job every week that passes. Today’s meeting was literally a brainstorming festival. We had the opportunity and good fortune to bring Mr. Tasos Anastasiadis into the team. Mr.Anastasiadis is a lecturer in Graphics Design at European University Cyprus and a game enthusiast, to talk to us and educate us about some of the basics in the visual part of designing a game.
Dr. George Christou, Mr. Anastasiadis and all the members of the team –minus 1- gathered all together and discussed about the project. All, ”cough”, the storyboards were ready and we are about to begin explaining the plot. The game is about an adventurer that happens to discover a cave during one of his journeys. Inside the cave exists a treasure map that captures the adventurer’s attention. So been such an adventurer, our character immediately seeks out to follow the map and discover whatever lies in the X mark of it. The game will consist of 4 levels, with each level bringing a different type of navigation and approach to the game. The first level will be on foot, meaning our character will run around in a possibly wooded area. At the end of the first level the character will discover the “flying cape”, giving our character the ability to fly, which will use in the second level. The second level, also known as our “flying level” will take place all the way up in the skies.
When we explained the plot to Dr. Christou and Mr. Anastasiadis, and how the game’s story would pan out across the 5 different levels, they had some good ideas and helpful inputs on it. Firstly Mr.Anastasiadis gave us some general guidelines of how we can improve our game. The game needs to be visually interesting in a way that the colors and color variation to be identifiable and appealing to the player. He also explained us the meaning and gravity of having memorable characters within our game. Characters that all people can relate to and identify them easily, whether it is from their facial features or weapons they wield or even the way they behave or walk in the game. Identifiable characters are the key for people to recognize the game just by looking at the player figure. Once we understood the significance of having such characters in our game we assigned to a few members a character design research which is scheduled to be completed next week. I am really interested in seen what they come up with. The brainstorming continued, and everyone was pitching in to see how we can make our game better. We had some good advices from the instructors, interesting ideas from all the members, different ways of strengthening our scenario and the mix and matching of ideas ultimately produced some great results. Ideas about weapons, character and enemy abilities, environment and scenery, scenario twists and game challenges, achievements, color variations and the fact that we are making a game for both boys and girls, were all brought to the table. All we have to do now is lock into them and start working!
Dr. Christou brought into our attention a number of competition that we could potentially take part of once the game is complete and gave us an understanding of how we could have some of these competitions in the back of our mind while designing the game and know what places and potentials exist out there for our game.
Although we were one man short because Mr. Verropoullos was “called” to do a “broadcast” for the “radio”, it was a very good meeting overall. Great communication between the members and the instructors and brilliant ideas from all. Next week, coding! We are getting down and dirty on beginning to structure our base code for the game as well as finalizing on our character designs.
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