Monday 5 May 2014

My current ideas, works in progress and how I go about documenting my ideas

Hello and welcome back to my game development oriented blog if your a regular reader and if your new welcome!

In my last post I touched on my background and gave a brief overview of where I am with my Game development career. If your new to the blog I invite you to check it out here. Next step is to start documenting properly the various games I have in development and establish a standard way of displaying these for easier reading for you my blog readers.

So with that in mind my current list of games on my to do list are here, these range from concepts and ideas through to games where I have made some assets and have working levels. They all share one thing in common though, they all are not complete!

Project list:
  • Antz, - a puzzle game for web / mobile,
  • Elementz, - a platform game for pc,
  • Gravity, - a puzzle game for web / mobile,
  • Loggers Run, - a fast paced reaction oriented game for web / mobile,
  • Lynx, - a side scrolling shooter for web / pc,
  • Redwood Creak (joint project with +James Macleod), - survival / horror platformer for web / pc,
  • Zombie Survivor, - action strategy shooter for web / mobile / pc,
For each of these projects I have numerous scraps of paper lying around the place with all sorts of things written on them, mechanics ideas, level layouts, character descriptions, rough outlines for gameplay etc but for the most part they lack structure, one thing I will fix with these blog updates. I also intend to use a program called spiderscribe. If you've never used this program before then I can highly recommend it, I've historically used it for brainstorming / mind mapping and documenting this process for academic projects / assessments. While the idea may seem tedious it really does help to have something like this that you can form your game ideas and concepts around. It's free and allows you to import documents, pictures, links etc that make for easy reference and a way of securing your information so you don't loose all that precious game related stuff.

For each game project I try to follow a pretty linear approach when developing my concept into a working title through to releasing it. Flesh out my idea using spiderscribe > create an introduction to the project piece outlining what the game is about, who it is aimed for, which platforms I want to release on, my initial ideas on what revenue model I will adopt, graphical concepts > then focus on more game oriented assets like tile-sets, characters, backgrounds, sounds etc. > start making the game mechanics, menu's and bringing it all together.

Each of these projects will form the basis of my ongoing project oriented blogs where I will document them further and provide a bit more insight into each game and what stage I am at with it, with uni coming to a end my intention is that I will upload at least 2 blogs every week, one being an update on one of the above listed projects (or new projects) and the other being more of a topical piece exploring one of the aspects I have had to face or come up against in learning about my new trade outside of the lecture theatre's and labs.

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