#vizcachastudios

[synergybct]

We need more posters for our studio wall.

[synergybct]

Reformation & Process Update

We spoke with Aldo, founder of the upcoming game studio Project Limbus, which was created after he finished university. He shared some insights with us about game development after uni, generally in terms of how things are going at the studio. What was more relevant for me however was the advice and knowledge that he shared with me about creating a game studio after uni, something which I’m considering pursuing.

In the meanwhile, we’re still continuing with our work on Bard - the game we’re making for Studio IV. We’ve switched from Unity to Unreal simply because more people in the group are familiar with it, so it just makes sense in terms of efficiency (not to mention it’s about time I learn Unreal). Shouldn’t take me long to get up to scratch.

We’re putting a big focus in to doing proper weekly sprints now, following Aldo’s advice. Monday is for ideation and heavy paper prototyping, followed by development on Tuesday and Wednesday. We use Thursday as a day to polish things up in preparation for a weekly planned external playtest every Friday. We also have an internal playtest on Wednesday to check that each idea is still working as intended and we aren’t aware of any immediate flaws we might not have considered.

[synergybct]

Musical Sorcery 101

So we know that we want the player to be able to play music freely and that we want what they play to determine which spells are cast and to potentially modify their properties. This isn’t a simple system to program, to say the least. Time for another diagram to explain the first concept I had for how to handle the system.

The system functionally works like you would see in Mortal Kombat or Magicka, you press buttons in sequence to form combos. While this ticks our discovery and mastery design philosophy boxes, player self-expression is significantly weakened with this concept. More to come.

[synergybct]

Ideation

Now that a group has been sorted, we must decide what our focus and project will be based around this semester. In order to include everyone’s ideas and contributions, I tasked each group member with writing a project proposal (potentially more than one, if applicable). We went through each proposal and interrogated key points - advantages, disadvantages, risks, etc.

The proposals were wildly varied in terms of scope and technology. I fancied the idea for an adventure game that @snafufuu​ proposed, titled ‘Aeronautica’. The game is based on Studio Ghibli’s film Porco Rosso, where seaplane pirates harass both the seas and skies. We decided not to pursue this idea as we felt it was too large in scope and not as suitable in the context of assessment as our other proposals were.

I proposed that we create an alternate reality version of our studio space which could be viewed through your phone, as if it was a window into another world. There was lots of potential for us to wow people who would see this during Open Studio. We decided not to continue with this concept, primarily because we all felt that it was too specific in terms of the outcome. We’d prefer to iterate on our ideas, not work towards a final pre-determined outcome. This would limit our creative potential.

We discussed a few VR projects (@oscar-randle-bct​’s DJ VR concept, as well as a martial arts VR concept I was interested in working on), however we decided not to pursue these projects because of two reasons, firstly that we didn’t have a VR headset (other attempts at finding one failed, and acquiring one would be costly) and we’ve been advised by other peers who have done VR projects before that they can easily turn into a huge pain in the ass to work on.

The proposal we went with in the end was submitted by @krouxbct​, which later was titled ‘Bard’. The concept of the proposal revolves around playing music with a ‘real instrument’ to cast and control magical spells. We’re focusing on three main design pillars: discovery, self-expression, and mastery. More to come as we iterate on our ideas and design Bard.