Today is the start of our second project which probably is our most important project. It is the most important because all of this is most likely going to be the ONE thing that we can present to our potential LIA spots, if you have not done anything on the side. I have not really done anything at home yet so this is really important to me.
The game that we are going to make is a first person slasher game. A fast paced game where you run around in a building trying to get to the top floor to kill the evil overlord. You battle your way up the building through floors. Each floor have a certain amount of rooms and each room have their own look. The room system kind of works like The Binding of Isaac where the rooms are predetermined but how they are placed on each floor is random. The setting is Cyberpunk-ish with some asian elements. The player are wielding a lazer Katana and dashed and slashes through each floor. Each floor ends in a lobby where you will take an elevator to the next floor. Why the elevators is not going all the way up is a mystery. When you stand in the elevator you are given a choice to choose between 3 upgrades that somehow makes your character more fun to play / stronger. Those are the very basics of this projects. It's a mix of The Binding of Isaac, Shadow Warrior and Genji from Overwatch.
This first day we will spend on planning on how to work, creating the backlog, deciding how to work, in which program and so on. I have a level design role which is my primary passion. So I'll need to know in what measurements we are going to work with when it comes to grey boxing and such. I'm kind of nervous for this project since it's such an important thing that we are doing now. And this time around for project 2 we are a total of 18 people, it's the first time in school history we are such large groups. With only 2 groups instead of 4-5. This will make it harder with everything really. To communicate in a good way and have a cohesive workflow where everyone is in the loop as well as having a good workflow in GIT/ Source tree.
We've had 2 meeting so far. One with the designers and the leads in the respective fields to get some sort of hunch of how to structure the backlog so we don't miss anything. Which we will do anyway. But so they have a bigger thing to work from and add to. The meeting in turn brought up some more stuff that we discussed somewhat in a meeting after lunch.
After lunch we had this meeting where we somewhat established how the levels are going to be structured so that it's not the same every time and so we don't accidentally lock ourselves out of the lobby room where you are supposed to get to to progress. The levels are built on a grid where all the rooms are the same size and should have the option to be entered from the middle of each wall so the room can be placed anywhere on this grid. But on this grid some rooms may be blocked off so the layout is not as open as it would be if every room would be open. And each room would have an alternative "mesh" / "texture" so that if one side is blocked there should not be a doorway there with a wall inside of it instead of the path to the next room.
There was also a discussion about the movement in the game if we were go be able to jump but I think that idea was quickly scrapped. Since that would impact the level design and everything if we were to work with vertical rooms. And the approach that we are working towards is that the player should always be moving. That is one of the key things we need to consider when designing this game. Now in the beginning there is a lot of things that needs to be fleshed out and managed and planned and it's a lot to take in. As long as there is a lot of communication and mutual decisions between us designers , and of course between the programmers and artists as well but mostly between the designers. Then we can keep a nice environment to work in and to really bring this vision to life.
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