However, as a cohort we spoke at length about our thesis games. We were free to pitch our final design docs from last semester's game design class, or anything else we wanted to pitch. But everyone had to pitch, alone or on a team, and a team could consist of up to five people. Pretty simple. This would eventually lead into Bob, Roger, Craig, and Mark deciding on which games would be prototyped for the industry panel night in four weeks, where our thesis games would be decided upon. Or at least this was the plan we had been told for a semester.
I thought about pitching The Next Dragon, my game design final, but after considering the animation and modeling requirements, I came to the conclusion that it just wouldn't be feasible. I really like that game design idea, but with our current artist constraints (meaning we have two artists our of 25 people) it was better left un-pitched. Jason K came up to me shortly after I decided this and pitched a basic synesthesia idea that combined the grinding mechanic of Sonic Adventure 2 with a rhythm game mechanic of grinding on strings. I love music games, and this type of game, while the artistic theme is incredibly important, it's not super asset intensive. We brainstormed a bit, and came up with some ways to expand the game, but it just wasn't clicking completely for me. I loved it, but it needed something more.
Meet Vinyl, the game where the player's avatar is the needle of a record, and the player grinds the grooves of the vinyl, controlling the speed and balance, both affecting the sound of the music. I played a ton of music games, such as Sound Shapes, Dyad, Beat Hazard, and Audiosurf, and took meticulous notes on what I liked and what I didn't. Then I spent many sleepless nights working on the design in my head, until the Saturday before the pitch (which was on Tuesday), I finally had that "A-ha" moment.
Not that a-ha.
For Christmas my girlfriend got me a nice audio setup with a turntable, something I've been wanting to get into for long time. I started to look up just how records work and why I like the sound better. That led into discovering how the vinyl literally transcribes the analog sound wave on the record, and how records create stereo sound, among other things. This served as the inspiration for our newly reborn, Phoeinx-like game: Vinyl. I immediately wrote a bunch of design down on mine and Jason's Google doc and then texted Jason. After we discussed some of the finer details, I got to work on our pitch. See the presentation below (unfortunately the awesome, rave-like glow effect I put on every piece of text and image didn't translate):
My biggest concern with all of the music games I played over the weekend was that most of the mechanics didn't act as any sort of metaphor for the music I was experiencing. So my design question was: how can I create a music game that uses the mechanics as a metaphor for music creation or experience? I decided to get pretty literal, and eventually made the player the needle of a record player, where the player is actually creating music by expressing the sound waves on a vinyl record. It also happened to match up with the grinding mechanic that Jason wanted to use (and looked really cool). Sometimes it's kind of amazing when things work out so well. Whether that was due to a lot of hard work or a little luck, I don't mind either way.
So we gave our pitch, and got some feedback. I knew things were looking good when I had multiple people come up to me after the pitch and express their desire to work on our game. But it wasn't up to us right? The powers-that-be are going to choose our games, right? Turns out no, not this semester.
It seems many people in the previous cohort just didn't care about their thesis games, and the games suffered for it. This cohort they're changing things up. We are now deciding what games we prototype, and then they'll decide which games continue on to be made into our thesis games, whether that be two or five of them. The rules right now are as follows: each prototype must be made by at least five people and no more than 12. This gives us a maximum of five games being prototyped out and presented at the industry panel (since we have 25 people in the cohort). Other than that, there are no rules. Of the 21 game ideas presented to the class, we have to pick at least five. This is really tough, as they were all really good ideas.
Fortunately, Jason and I were lucky enough to have people sign on to our game almost immediately. As of right now, we have something like eight people wanting to make it, with a few others I know of interested if their games fall through. Tomorrow is the cut-off day, but it seems very promising that we'll, at the very least get to prototype our game for the next three weeks, and I'm very excited.
There's something amazing about having an idea, being incredibly excited about it, working hard on it, and then having a bunch of people follow that idea and make it their own. I'm thrilled to have something I played a major part in creating get so much support.
Next time: (hopefully) prototyping our game and new challenges.
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