Game designer
Today started the DGG Summer GameDev organised by the Dutch Game Garden, in which 3 teams of approximately 5 students from multiple disciplines will make a game. Being part of the 2nd team, I will make a daily journal containing our development and process. My team consists of Sherida Halatoe (GDD @ HKU), Rik van Duijn (DVTG @ HKU), Paul Brinkkemper (UU), Guido Soetens (UU) and myself. We do not have a team name yet, but that will come soon, I promise!
Start of the Summer GameDev
One of the National Geographic Magazines
Today started with an opening talk of JP van Seventer, followed by a presentation by Jasper Koning, designer at Ronimo, about the process of making their first WiiWare title Swords & Soldiers. When the teams were announced, every team sat together to talk about the formal elements of the team, who would be team leader (Paul), lead artist (Sherida), lead code (Guido), lead design (Adriaan) and blogger (Adriaan). After that, the assignment was announced: search the National Geographic magazines provided for systems or organisms that could be a good base for your game. We got 2,5 hours to find three concepts and presented these to the other groups.
The three topics that inspired our group were about fighting flies and swarm intelligence, natural elements such as light, water, temperature, wind, etc. and the use of lightning, which could be used in a game as a light or as a path. We will make a decision tomorrow which of these topics will be the base of the game we are going to prototype and built the coming days. Who knows what this will result in!
Last but not least, we got a very long but interesting presentation from Floris Kooij from Guerrilla Games about concept creation in their design team. The two methods he gave us were very useful!
To be continued…