Challenge 1 Prep

Hello everyone!

This week was a lot of working towards getting ready for challenging stage 1. We came up with several good ideas in meetings during this time, so it was interesting trying to get things together in a quick manner.


I met with Professor Patel last Thursday and we discussed the concepts that I had and some of the ideas we had going forward. She seemed to like the painting and cooking concepts and the fact that they had high potential for humor. She thought the painting concept seemed a little highbrow (I'll discuss that one later in this post).
As for the digger concept, she liked the ideas I had, especially that I explored so many game play styles, but thought I did not have enough different directions as I did with the platform combat game. I made a few character examples exploring possible options.

The ant idea was especially popular in our team for a 'God Save the Queen' mode 

Regarding the combat platformer, we came up with new ideas based on the last round of concepts I created.

For the paint concept, we came up with a mechanic that would require the player to manage a paint resource. Using one's abilities would sap their paint resource and they would have to receive more paint by successfully attacking other players or finding paint that would enter into the scene randomly during the battle. In addition, we kicked around the idea of the character's abilities affecting the environment by making it change colors, but we're still working out the details of how that would work in scope. 

We added onto the paint idea by expanding it to the whole theme and expanding the world where it would take place. One idea was that characters would be based on famous painting styles, as well as the abilities they would use.

Monster themed on 'Garden of Earthly Delights', a cubist creature,
 a pointillist lady, and a Van Gogh styled Cypress Treant

For the chef battle idea, we thought it would be interesting to expand upon the customizeable nature of food. We are playing with the idea of having the abilities be upgrade-able based on skill trees as the battle goes on. One example we had was having the skill trees be based on the 4 flavors of the tongue: sweet, sour, spicy, and bitter. Oh, and there's umami, too, but I still have a hard time believing that one :P Remy (one of my designers) explained it to me, and I guess for all intents and purposes it would be good to have.


We've decided to go forward with the platform combat game. I'm too excited about all of the possibilities for this one and the ideas we've come up with so far. I feel like it'll be a really good chance to stretch my creative reach and explore things I haven't really seen in games so far.

Tune in next week to see if we pass the first Challenge!