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Rowan Ledgerwood, Level 3 Year 2
Project Outline
Project Outline
The brief for this project is all about flexibility and creativity. The official project brief is as follows:
"A local reputable indie game development company is looking for ideas and concepts to be submitted for potential new game ideas. The company would like concept and promotional material submissions across a range of genres and audiences. The idea is for these concepts to be considered to go through into full production."
This essentially gives us, the creators, full freedom over the style of game, the genre of game, the character archetypes, and most everything else. For the next ten weeks, we will be doing the following:
Research into our chosen style/genre of video game, including its target audience (2 weeks).
Develop ideas for our video game concept (2 weeks).
Produce our concepts, including the development of a narrative structure, at least 3 character concepts, 2 environmental concepts, a 30 second moving image trailer for the hypothetical video game, and finally and A2 poster promoting the game. All of this needs to be done with consideration of target audience (5 weeks).
Evaluate the entire project (1 week).
There will be an emphasis on target audience throughout this project, as it will cover a large proportion of the mark scheme.
In order to move forward with all aspects of this project, I first need to figure out twothings; the genre of the game, and the art style. Two things are going to influence this choice; my personal skills and interests, and existing video games that inspire me.
When it comes to my skills, I really enjoy creating characters and writing arcs - I am a storyteller by nature. I also enjoy drawing and concepting characters more than background, so I am going to need to remember to create environments as well as characters (as I tent to prioritise things I find fun over things that are perhaps more difficult). With these factors in mind, I think I should try to create a game that has a specific emphasis on character and storyline, as a pose to worldbuilding or environments.
When thinking about games that have inspired me over the years, especially in relation to indie games, a few different genres come to mind. The game Minecraft has always been a favourite, however open-world survival games are difficult to write a compelling storyline for. Subnautica is a game where the creature design and worldbuilding is nicely balanced by a subtle storyline with compelling characters, however it might be too much of an abstract concept for my more human-based art style. One game immediately comes to mind as a good candidate - Stardew Valley. This is a game that I bought fairly recently (only about a year ago), but have already rucked up over 120 hours. I will most definitely go into more detail about this game during my research, however it is a game with a rich environment and storyline, with engaging characters that you can get to know and unlock new parts of their personalities. It is also in a very simplistic pixel art style, which I absolutely love. Ithink that this art style will be the main inspiration for my game concept.
Considering all of this, I think that it would be fun to make concepts for a sort of visual novel/dating simulation game, wherein you can interact with characters and delve into their backstories and help them along character arcs. The art style of this video game will be more pixelated, akin to the Stardew Valley art style. I would love for this game to have some sort of twist, or perhaps a dark side to each character - maybe each of them have a secret hidden away in their backstory, for the player to unlock, and hints to this could be included in the teaser trailer or character designs.
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