Game designer
The fact that 3 out of 5 people did not sleep well last night and woke up too late to get on time might make you think that we had a rough morning. Well, we had that rough morning. We left day one with a lot of open doors and no decisions and it was clearly on everyones mind that we were kind of stuck when we ended. After a few attempts to come up with a concept that would have fun and meaningful core mechanics we decided to go outside and smell the fresh air. And that helped; within 5 minutes we had a great core mechanic and some good ideas of how we could use those mechanics to create a fun game.
When we got back inside, we immediately collected tons of marbles and some items that could represent possible enemies and started prototyping how it would work. Here’s a video of us trying to think of strategies and ways to create interesting enemies.
So, where is the game and concept really about? Shaping a flock, basically. We were inspired by an article about swarm theory and flocking, some images I’ll post next time.
The idea is that the player controls two WiiMotes and is able to push or pull a group of flocking mosquito’s by pointing one of the WiiMotes at or near the mosquito’s and pressing the push or pull button. By pushing and pulling the group you can create shapes that are effective against certain enemies, help you through obstacles or help you avoid danger. We are still in the proces of coming up with good idea’s to make perfect use of this mechanic, that already seems awesome!
We started with creating a digital prototype today and have the next playtest session planned for tomorrow. We are using Flash (AS3) along with WiiFlash Server that makes the connection possible between the WiiMote and Flash, but it’s a rather unstable connection – something that I already found out a while ago when I worked on an interactive installation at Konijn2000. Also, we are using this awesome tool called Dropbox as a subversion repository, and it’s much and much easier than that Tortoise SVN I had to use on previous projects!
In a second thought, it’s funny that before we started to make this concept tangible we all seemed to be on the same line about our ideas and thoughts. I think that is what makes this phase so hard and may disappoint so many of us; not being able to implement or merge your own ideas with the ideas of your fellow designers without completely ruining the feel and look they had in mind. And to comprimise is one of the hardest things to do. Can’t situations like this be avoided?
Tomorrow is going to be an awesome day because we get to play the concept! Looking forward to it!
To be continued!
EDIT: Some more last minute photo’s from notes we took:
