Week 1-2: Ideation and Initial Concept Art

Summary

In these initial weeks of production, my team and I spent most of the time ideating and trying to come up with a concept for our game. The concept for the game that we ended up with for our game proposal came from combining the ideas of two of my teammates, using one for the setting and gameplay mechanics, and the other for the game structure and narrative mechanics. From there we divided the tasks to complete the game proposal.

My Contribution

In the ideation process, most of my role consisted of assisting in the synthesis of the two ideas my team members came up with. This included bouncing a few story ideas around with other team members, asking questions to try to clarify the members’ ideas and offering suggestions as to ways of consolidating their ideas. Aside from ideation, as the visual artist on my team, I spent most of my time creating the art for the game world, some initial character design sketches, and storyboarding the initial mechanics to put together the proposal.

Reflection

While no major problems have arisen yet, as it is still very early in the project, this week has been an introductory phase where we are still getting to know each other and how each of us works. This week there were some issues with our ability to schedule meetings efficiently due to one member needing to travel back into the country from China and communication needing to adjust to the time difference. However, I doubt this will be a persistent issue now that they are back in the country. Aside from interpersonal relationships, in terms of work, an issue that could be an issue in my work is the current character design of the player avatar, which is currently a humanoid form. As the game will be made using 3D assets, the concern is whether the player avatar being fully animated (such as full run and walk cycles) will be achievable within the scope of the project and whether if at all it will be seen by the player given the 2.5D/isometric camera view. One solution to this is to remove some of the humanoid features such as the legs and keep the animation to just the arms that are needed for the snowball mechanic.

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