Development Blog #2

I think the strongest prototyping week I have had in Production II has to have been the first week of prototyping for our green-light game. The reason I think this is because we essentially came up with 2 games in a week, and were able to ditch the initially more risky game we came up with at the beginning of the week and switch to the more solid and doable concept that we have now, Gnome Depot. The initial concept we had in mind was going to be a game where the main mechanic was skating on ice and when you would be able to fish up things underneath it by drawing a shape over it. If you have ever played the Mario Party 3 mini game Etch ‘n’ Catch, it was going to be relatively similar to that. At the time we spent a lot of time thinking of unique things to enhance the game and try to come up with a setting that made sense.

After about 2-3 days, we realized the challenge technically that came with being able to accomplish what we wanted the game play to be like and felt that it would be too difficult to implement in time for a presentation. This lead our team to hold an emergency meeting to try and either figure out a way to accomplish it in time, or to just go forward with a completely new concept. Thinking about it more, we eventually ended up scrapping our original game idea and coming up with a completely new one which we have come to love much more.

I feel like I had a pretty big role in this change, since I made sure to do preliminary research into our first concept to check possible ways to achieve what we wanted. Additionally, the concept for Gnome Depot mostly came from my mind, and I was able to come up with the general game play loop of what it would be relatively quickly during the emergency meeting, which was the main catalyst I feel for us going forward with it. I do not know where my sudden passion for this concept came from, but it has lead me to take a secondary design role and I think the team is overall much more excited about it than our initial concept.

One thing I will definitely remember from this process is that doing research as soon as possible is very important, and being able to see potential problems of a concept and communicating that with the rest of the team is essential.