BA2A♥Indie Dev♥ Game Project: After the End Weeks 1-3
12:58Week 1
After finding out our theme was ‘inference’, I began to note down potential game titles and concepts. Initially, I was quite set on the idea of one character finding out about their life after their death; however, I found this to be quite trope-y and commonly done, so I decided to change my idea but still keep the idea of the game inferring something about the protagonist that they do not know. I then decided to change my idea to a game about someone finding out about their past life (as if they had been reincarnated), however while planning I found it difficult to figure out how the player could be told they were right since it wasn’t possible to have both reincarnations of the character in the game at once.
After these and numerous other ideas, I settled on the idea of a game about a game; I wanted to keep the concept of someone finding out about their own life, but wanted someone who knew about everything to be able to let the player know they were right. To fill these roles, I chose the character of Irene, an NPC in a game who served as motivation for a major character, and the Creator, the game’s creator who knew everything about Irene since they made her themselves. I wanted to explore the relationship between creator and creation and make the Creator a character that could fill in for not only myself, but become a character lots of content creators who struggle with accepting their work could relate to.
Using this idea, I began to sketch out designs and created a piece of art using Irene, who I had decided to make the protagonist of the game. I also wrote up my ideas about the game and picked out some music using free music resource site hmix and compiled them in one document. Although this was too long to become my sell sheet and didn’t have finalised ideas yet, it helped to solidify the characters and narrative for later iterations.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qZjoFUWY_p9zhqFz2r7AH_QrJbHGcDYnTqnb9P_B9l0/edit?usp=sharing
Week 2
During this week, I began to create art and assets for my game. This was quite a heavy drawing week as I wanted to have most of my assets completed before loading them into Unreal. I began by creating my most important character illustrations that would also be used as talksprites (for Irene and Creator). After this, I created Irene’s walking sprites and a background for the game to take place in. The background is very simple. I wanted to carry on the static effect I used in the initial art the week before as i liked the effect and thought it fit the concept well, but I was also inspired by the bare-minimum design of Super Paper Mario’s chapter 6-1, World of Nothing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMRhHu1lEvQ). Although I didn’t want it to be quite as bare as this stage, I quite liked the idea of the world looking pale and unfinished.
Since I had a background, I also decided to create my first draft of the level design. Although this was very simple, it gave me space to plan out my space and start assembling platforms in Unreal.
Looking back, I feel that I should have experimented more with UE4 in this week so that I could have a more solid foundation for the upcoming weeks.
Week 3
In this week, I created more assets such as talksprites and started blocking out my level. However, as I worked on it I realised that the layout of the level was not interesting or fun to play, and decided to change it to be more vertical than horizontal. I thought this better fit the game theme of leaping into the unknown. I came up with another draft of the level design and spent some time putting it together in Unreal so that I could have the character run around and jump in order to test that everything worked and could be reached.
Although I ended up changing this a bit more as I blocked it out in Unreal, I thought this was much more interesting to play through. During this week, I also created the first draft of my two-page sell sheet.
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