Introductions and Concepts

Hello everyone. My name's Liznel and I'm the Art Lead on Team Swanboats. I'll be your host(ess) through this exciting world of game development. This blog was created to fulfill some requirements for our senior capstone project and to document the trials of the art side of Team Swanboats. As this is an intro post of our ideas, this one may get a little long-winded, so please bear with me. =)

Team Swanboats was first banded at the end of last semester. We met up a few weeks ago for our first meeting came up with several concepts. Last Tuesday, we pitched two ideas to our class that seemed to get pretty good feedback. These are the ideas, and some accompanying concept art for both of them so far.

The first idea was a for a 2-dimensional multi-player game where the player takes on the role of a mole. The player digs around, plants traps, and harasses player opponents and NPCs (non-player characters). One of the end goals we kicked around was that because of mole's shortsightedness, their reason for attacking each other is that they think 'other' things around them are enemies. We've taken a lot of consideration into the gameplay based on the mole and it's characteristics. For instance, we have the idea of players being able to place scent based markers to tell what they put down. Or, and this was suggested in our first class, to utilize vibration in the controller so the player can tell when/what other things are around them.
This game's style of play was inspired by Worms and Bomber Man.

Artistically, I'm considering two different avenues as of now. I played around with two very different silhouettes as I'm still not convinced on whether or not the game should go in a realistic direction or a more stylized one. Over the summer, I worked on a game involving wildlife. The game was meant to be realistic as it was going to be ported to play at an aquarium to teach about the invasive species in the local area. We would have meetings with members from the aquarium, some of whom had a lot of in-depth scientific knowledge and gave critique on the fish and animals I was working on for the game.
I feel that if we did this for our game, and by that I mean making the moles realistic, there would be less design involved. While I'm not against this, I would still like to be able to push them to be stylized. I think a good medium between the two is to exaggerate the differences in shape of the species of moles in the picture above. I would still like to explore the more 'cartoony' look such as the example on the side. I'm a sucker for cute characters and moles seem to have a history in games of being rendered particularly 'cutesy', save for a few examples...

(Pictured above starting with top right and going clockwise:
Resetti from Animal Crossing, Monty Mole from Paper Mario,
Naked mole rat from Fallout, Mole from Harvest Moon) 

 I would like the player to have a fun experience playing this game and be reminded of good times playing with friends. A little friendly competition never hurt anyone, but it would be an honor for this game to end up being a 'friendship breaker' the likes of say, Mario Kart, Mario Party, or Dokapon Kingdom.

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Our second game concept was for a multi-player fighting game that works in two parts. The second part involves any normal fighting game similar to say, Super Smash Brothers. The characters stand on platforms and use their skills to lower the health of up to 3 other players. The first part however, is where it differs. Players will have the ability to choose their own character, but these characters do not come with their own skills. Players can choose their own skills to equip for their character's kit in a draft mode to the game.
This game concept draws inspiration from 'non-traditional' fighters like Super Smash Brothers and Awesomenauts, and card games like Magic the Gathering.

This game's art direction had a little bit more of an open-ended feeling. For this one we only had the mechanics, and nothing really to go off of for art style or direction, so to start with, I came up with these two ideas. Fighting games are usually very character heavy, so I had to think of a way to scope back on that as I am only one artist. The mechanic of the game itself helps in this way, since the moves are chosen and are not specific to one character. Because of this, I pitched these two starting ideas.

The Magic Academy concept came about because I like wizards and witches. I feel that having chosen abilities would work with playing as either a witch or wizard because they could be so open-ended. There's room to have a tinge of humor in the 'spell cards' they choose, hence why one of the spells involves a gelatin shield. The inspirations for this idea lay heavily in anime like Little Witch Academia and Card Captors.

The second concept went more in the direction of having the fighters be literal blank slates. I'm not sure one could get any blanker than something akin to a test dummy. The 'Builder Bots' come from a universe where bot fighting is very popular. Moves for the bots are chosen from the Bot Fighting Winner's Hall of Fame, and the bots themselves would have customization choices with different heads to switch out and different colors in order to make them more distinct.
This concept erred more on the line of silly, cartoon violence with big, possibly goofy weapons. In our meeting today, the idea was brought up that the bot's fights could be something televised and commercialized, similar to monster truck rallies. However, we're not entirely sold on this idea as we're afraid it might seem too close to one of the directions done by last year's seniors.

I feel I'm going to move more forward with the magic academy concept, and work on diverging from that direction. Our Lead designer wants me to explore the use of familiars as the cards selected, and I agree with that direction. As a child, I loved reading books such as the Dragon Riders of Pern and would often wonder what it'd be like to have a dragon or some sort of mystical creature as a companion. If we could have that feeling expressed in our game through that mechanic, I'd be happy with that.

I'd like for the player to take away the experience of wanting to learn more about the combinations of the moves they select, and which ones synergize the best to them. I want the experience from this game to be one of curiosity and thinking on how best to utilize one's options.

That's it for this week. Stay tuned for next week as we should have some screenshots of our prototype thus far!