Hi everyone,
My name is Aaron Goldman and I am a senior Game Designer. More specifically my specialization is in narrative writing. Although that may be the name of the specialization I focus more so on giving the audience an experience from the narrative, not just reading dialogue.
Coming into this senior year my major focus was to supply my players with a narrative which can be told both through text but most importantly from the experience they receive from the game and the atmosphere they play in. Trying to break a norm is a big part of making a successful game in the industry. We find carbon copies of games dull unless they have a big name over them. Even then you can run a well dry eventually. We are stressed in our program to innovate and create new mechanics and challenges for a player to face and experience while playing.
Over the summer my group and I pushed around a few ideas. At first we started with trying to make a game to fit a genre. Afterwards we realized that we were making mechanics and fitting them to genre's. Continuing with this idea we dumped the genre's and started from a raw mechanic. Ton of games are passed around, moving from basic to more complex mechanics. As we would add new ideas we would eliminate ideas which didn't seem logical for our time frame.
One very important thing to keep in mind during this first conceptual is scope. You must find the core of your concept and stick to just that very basic concept at first. Things can always be added later but when you promise and can;t deliver in time, well there is nothing worse. This also will help in the long run when you find that you simply don't have enough people to put enough hours in.
With our group we have been trying to come up with simple mechanics that will be easy to iterate on. We are using the Agile system (See: Scrum/Agile) which means that every week we will create a working prototype of what we have so far. From there we will slowly iterate and work on what we have each week as a sprint. This can help us prevent going out of scope and still allow us to build on what we have already.
My team and I are trying to have a very unique at the core of our concepts. For example one of our concepts will pit people against each other yet they cannot attack each other directly. This will force the player to think creatively in order to move ahead and defeat the other players.
On the opposite spectrum we have games that function similar to Snake merged with Mario where you build blocks and can jump on them. Instead we add a spin on a very simple concept like making it 3d and that one spin adds a whole new strategy to a game like that.
As we take our first steps into creating concepts for our Capstone we have to face many dangers and keep our eyes open. It isn't just simply to create a cool idea but to know it is something you and your group are capable of. I beg of all budding Game designers not to over iterate and blow scope out of proportion in this stage. It is very easy to get more excited about one concept over the other and to keep building and forget you forgot to even program in the camera.
As we press on through the year this blog will stay updated as to how our group is doing and what we go through as a full team of Senior Game Majors.
Keep Creating
Aaron
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