The past week I had my first experience with hands on game design. I signed my self up for the pilot of a new project, which is initiated by the Dutch Game Garden (the site is in Dutch), the DGG Summer GameDev. During this project I had the pleasure to work together with students of the Utrecht school of arts (HKU) and the University of Utrecht (I attend the Hogeschool van Amsterdam). It was a very cool experience to work the students from the HKU that are studying to become either a (game)artist or game designer.During the project we had to created a game, in one week. I was assigned to a group of six people. We had one artist (Anna), three game designers(Thomas, Daniel and Joeri) and two programmers (Marries and myself). To get us started on the game each team got a stack of National Geographics to get inspired. Our inspiration came from the following article.
As you probably can see our game is about a Turtle. After we established that we started to work on the core mechanics of the game. After a lot of ideas, some were great some were not so great, and a lot of debate we ended up with two game concepts.Both of the concepts had one thing in comon and that was that the turtle was fleeing a toxic cloud which was spreading through the waters in which our turtle lives. The concepts differ in the way the turtle can escape/outrun the toxic cloud. In the first concept the turtle can use currents to get a boost. The idea was that the player should try to find the best path to keep ahead of the toxic cloud. below is a picture of the paper prototype we made for this concept.
In the second concept the turtle can grap the fishes, and a boat, that pass it by. to do this the turtle has the ability to extend it's neck. In the video below you can see us play the paper prototype (you can hear us talking in dutch).We chose to go with the second prototype. The most important reason was that we could not create a paper prototype of the other concept that was actually fun to play. We thought it could be fun but to create levels that were fun we would have had to put a lot of effort in level design, and we thought that one week would not be enough time to do this. Besides the second concept was a lot more fun to play.
To get to this point took us two days after which we started on the digital prototype. It was the first time I had programmed in Flash Actionscript, and therefore it was an eye opener for me. When I started this blog it was my intention to make a game using XNA, but now I am not so sure. I can still finish the game using XNA or C++, but I will definitly use flash to create the first digital prototypes of my game. It was amazing to sea how easy it is to create a game in flash and how little time it takes. This comes in handy when creating a prototype because it gives you the ability to quickly play the prototype and more in portant let other people play with it.
The most important thing I learned during this week was to truly understand the importance of turning your ideas into somthing playable. By turning your ideas in something you can actually play gives you a great inside in whether or not the gameplay is fun, complex, over the top or what ever the firts play test result will generate. I surely am going to use a lot of the principles I learned during this week in the first stages of creating my very firt independent game.
A more indepth summary of the week can be read on the blog of our team TurtleBytes
