Meet the Turtle

Yesterday the Dutch Game Garden (DGG) Summer GameDev started. The GameDev is an one week project in which several students, who are pasionate about creating games, collaborate in small groups to create a Game. When I entered the DGG building there were already a lot of the attending students there. It was great to enter a room where everybody shares a passion for creating games.
The first order off business was a short introduction to the project and a little more information about what we could expect the coming week. After that the groups were revealed and talked amongst them selves to get to know each other and to determine the tasks for the GameDev week. Our team consists of:

• Thomas (Project leader)
  
• Joeri (Design lead)
• Marries (Tech lead)
• Anna (Art lead)
• Daniel (Elead)
• me, Ferry (Blog lead)

After the team introductions the first lecture started. The subject of the lecture was the design steps which game studio Romino Games went through to create there resently released Wii Ware game Swords and Soldiers. It was very cool to get a more insightfull look into how a game developer goes about creating a game. We saw some shots of games which were the inspiration for Swords and Soldiers and some screenshots of the prototypes which turned into Swords and Soldiers.
When the lecture was over and we had lunch it was time to start working on our own game. As a handle for our creative process each team got several National Geographics as a source of inspiration. the Idea was that we should go through several issues of the magazine to find something we could turn in to a game mechanic. As you can imagine we came up with a lot of great, and some not so great, ideas. After a vivid debate we settled on three of our ideas.

The turtle game

The idea behind the turtle game was that we wanted to create a multiplayer coop game. The cooporation would be used to move the turtle. Each player could control one part of the turtle, of which there are more then players. By cooporating the players could move the turtle as smooth as possible.

Infectosaurus (I think it spells like this, right Thomas)

Infectosaurus was an idea in which the player should infect a human body. The way the game should work was the invers of tower defence. in tower defence the player builds a defence to stop hordes of enemies, in infecto saurus the defence is already build into the human body and the player should create effective hordes of infetious elements.

Light and Dark

The light and Dark idea was our most abstract idea which no one could really explain very well, but I'll give it a try. The idea that we created two dimensions, by lack of a better word, which existed simultaneous. One in the light (day) one in the dark (night). And after this point every team member has his or her own idea about what the games is.

The next step in the process of making the game is choosing the idea with which we are going to continue and start making paper prototypes of it. More about that in later posts