The Troubles of Prototyping

So. First blog post of my senior production class. I love my team, we were able to not only generate 50 ideas for games, but also cut it back down to our main 3 within a matter of days.

The ideas we settled on are a Chimera fighting game, where players make their own Chimera, then fight other Chimeras to get new parts for their own Chimera; A VR Fishing game where you start with nothing and have to use lots of weird and wild fish as materials to make cool stuff; and a high mobility platformer involving lots of grenades and explosions. As such, we were able to start prototyping right away.

I was tasked with coming up with proper systems for the Chimera game. I started with writing down some overarching systems for three different variations of the game. Right away, I noticed a potential problem. Two of the versions, as well as the original idea, were action based fighting games. Add in the ability to swap out parts, and these two versions were going to be very hard to prototype in a short amount of time. The third version didn't have this problem, being a turn based game, but I knew that the team really wanted to do action fighting mechanics.

I thought about it for a bit... and a bit more... and I still haven't come up with anything yet. Moral of the story: Sometimes there just isn't an easy way to do things.

That doesn't mean I'm going to stop trying, of course. First, I'm going to stat out some usable body parts for all three versions of the game, then see what I can accomplish with blocks and programmer animations.