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Week 1 - Game Ideas and Research

  • Writer: Patrick Sharpe
    Patrick Sharpe
  • Oct 1, 2023
  • 3 min read

Updated: Nov 13, 2023

Hello and welcome to week 1 of development for my major project.


I'd like to detail what I've been working on the past week.


Discussion Topics

  • Major Project

  • Project Management

  • Pre-Production

  • Early Pitch


Major Project


Game Premise

Competitive Party Brawler with Physics Combat and Challenging Obstacles

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Game Reference

Game Genres

  • Isometric Top-Down

  • Competitive

  • Party Brawler

Features

  • Couch-Play with split-screen and full-screen

  • Character Selection

  • Leaderboard System

Platform

  • PC (Controller Only) on Steam and Itch.io.


Target Audience


Game aimed at PEGI-12 - A person aged 12 or older


Specific Target Audience

  • Couch-Players – Classic game style

  • Competitive Party Players – Enjoys Win/Loss game format

  • Brawler Players – Entertaining and fun to play

My Roles

I have many roles to fill in on this project as it is practically a solo project with a contribution to sound and music from a Sound Designer.


here are a list of roles in order of development time

  1. Game Programmer

  2. Game Designer

  3. Level Designer

  4. UI Designer

  5. Project Manager

  6. QA Tester

  7. Dev Blogger

Scope

Deciding on the scope of the project was spent mostly during the planning stage of the project, making sure the project is feasible to develop over the module course of 24 weeks.


Timeline

Text in Yellow is stages outside of the 24 week module course which adds an extra 8 weeks of development to the project.

  • Planning (4 Weeks) – From Aug 14th to Sept 11th.

  • Pre-Production (4 Weeks) - From Sept 25th to Oct 23rd.

  • Production (15 Weeks) - From Oct 23rd to Dec 18th, Jan 1st to Feb 26th.

  • Testing (6 Weeks) – From Feb 26th to Apr 8th.

  • Pre-launch (2 Weeks) - From May 13th to May 27th.

  • Launch – Release on June 7th.

  • Post-launch (2 Weeks) – From June 10th to June 24th.

Project Management


Tools

Miro - Gathering ideas and research

Trello - Managing tasks and milestones

Discord - Communicate and share progress

Snipping Tool - Taking screenshots of development


Software

GitHub - Project Collaboration

Unreal Engine 5.2.1 - Game Engine

Figma - UI Design and Prototyping

Adobe Photoshop - Level Concepts and Designs

OBS - Recording videos of development

Word - Producing game design document

Excel - Weekly Schedule and Lists

PowerPoint - Project Presentations


Pre-Production


Game Design Document

During the planning stage of the project, I researched into game design documentation by looking at articles, websites and youtube videos.


Doing research helped me improve on my process of how I formatted and outlined GDDs. I then produced a template that I could use for any game project with relevant questions under headings.


I even looked into old GDDs i had made in the past to help with understanding the change of process as well as take in aspects that were valueable.


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Game Research

I had looked at a few games that were similiar to my game idea and gathered them as reference points when developing the game.


Here are some examples and reasons for using them:


Gang Beasts - Local Multiplayer

Fall Guys - Gameplay

Boomerang FU - Level and UI Design

Clone Drone in the Danger Zone - Combat and Sound Design

Totally Accurate Battlegrounds - Art Style and Physics


There is certainly more research to be made into how these games were developed and looking into the reasons why I choose them.


Early Pitch


This week, I presented an early pitch of the project discussing;

  • Project Type

  • Project Scope and Contributions

  • Tools and Software

  • Describing Game Design Document

  • Game Research

  • Development Journey

  • Prior Work

Lecture Feedback


Pros

  • Presentation is well crafted

  • Game Idea is great

Cons

  • Presentation had too many slides

  • Relied heavily on notes to guide presentation

  • Scope of project is too large

  • Not many relevant game references

Self-Feedback

  • Improve on knowledge of your project

  • Learn about elevator pitches

  • Scope down project to be player vs player with no AI or Narrative focus

  • Research into local multiplayer game references

Conclusion


In conclusion, I think I've made a significant amount of development in planning the project and will be moving forward with creating concepts for the game before presentating a pitch in Week 3. Although, this week's pitch wasn't a great start for the project but I can only improve at this point from self-improving.

 
 
 

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