Game Production II Blog Post 3
First thing’s first, my game didn’t get through the Greenlight selection process. I think we presented it pretty well, but there were a lot of other good ideas. I ended up representing our team at the meeting where we decided which games were going to get cut. It was a really hard decision, but in the end, it was unanimous that my game and one other team’s games would be cut, and that the members would then go to other teams. I’m still really sad about it. I’ve always wanted to make an RTS since I’ve never seen one from Champlain before. Also, pirates are cool. But I still respect the decision we made. There were a few problems with the game, and they would have been hard to fix.
After that, I ended up joining another team, and now I’m working on the level design for Five Finger Gunslinger, which is nice since it’s what I specialize in. Also, I’ve been wanting to learn more about FPS level design, since I don’t have a ton of experience with it. It was good getting more experience joining a team that already had a game and idea, although I did also do that at my internship in Montreal with Soul Reaper. I had to learn all of the stuff that the team had already done, what its plans were, and how they worked together. I ended up reading though their documents and then watching about an hour’s worth of interviews they did with some kids about the concept for their game.
The team has been working very well together so far. While it was a little weird at first while we all got used to working together, it’s all smoothed out now, and we have a really nice team dynamic together. They are really accepting of the ideas from me and from the other new person, Jake, who was the programmer from my last team as well. It’s nice to have our ideas considered as if we had been here the whole time. We’ve actually made some pretty big design changes based on some of the discussions we’ve had. One of the biggest problems facing our game was that we were worried about the concept and how it might be interpreted. The game was supposed to take place in kid’s imaginations, while they imagine being cowboys and making finger guns to have a battle, and whoever seemed the coolest at the end would win. We were really worried about how it would look for kids to be shooting at each other, and based on a conversation we all had, although I can’t remember whose idea it was originally, we ended up switching it from a PvP game to a PvE game. So, I think that really gets rid of all of the conceptual issues we’ve been having. So far, I’ve been studying FPS level design principles, and have sketched out a basic layout for a map. I’m about to start greyboxing it out in Unity later in the week so that we can start testing it.
