Paper prototyping

The second day of the GameDev was all about paper prototyping. We started the day by debating the three ideas and filtering out the idea we wanted to prototype. The idea we were going to stick with was the Turtle game. Now that we had a game we had to think up some features and start prototyping it.

The article in the national geographic that is the inspiration for the concept


Because we came up with a lot of features for the game we decided that every body would demonstrate how he or she saw the different features coming together in the game. We all drawed it out on a whiteboard. The features were:

• Turtle neck, the turtle can extend and retract its neck into it's shell
• Panic mode, the turtle can retract all it's limbs
• Turtle heads, the turtle has different heads for different purposes in it's shell. the turtle can change his head type to do different things.
• Thread, there was a thread which would drive the turtle to move as fast as possible. The thread is a toxic cloud of polution which is slowly filling the level.
• Current, in a current the turtle can move faster (finding nemo)
• boost pads, the boost pads are crocodiles. the player can get bitten by the crocodiles. if the neck of the turtle is extended it will be killed. if the turtle is in panic mode it will pop outoff the jaw of the crocodile which will give the turtle a boost.

Below are the pictures of the differen ideas we all had, except foor Joeries idea because he was the photographer ;)

Anna
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After we all had pitched our ideas about the features and how to use them in the game it was lunch time. After the lunch we continued by extracting the features we all found essential for the game. What we all agreed in was that there should be a thread in the game, so the Toxic cloud was going to stay. After we established we wanted Thread we started discussing the turtle neck. It was a very lively discussion after which we had the two concepts which we would prototype. The first was a concept based on the currents the second was based on a new feature. The new feature was that the turtle could extend it's neck and attach its self to a object that is passing by.
below are a picture and video of the paper prototypes and a picture of the white board on which we based out concept decisions.

Out decision board out of which the two final concepts emerged.


Picture of the paper prototype of the current concept. This prototype was made by Joeri, Thomas and myself. The white chips are the ground/obstacles. the green chips are sea weeds which would slow the player down. the pieces of white paper with the arrows on it are the currents.

A video of the paper prototype of the Fish concept.



After prototyping we decided unanimous to go with the Fish concept. After this the working day was over and we went over to Nixxes. Nixxes is a company that works on the engine of Tomb Raider (Underworld). It was a very cool excursion expecially for the coders, which I am. We got a very interesting look insed the kitchen of a company which mantains (parts) of a next gen engine. all the employies if Nixxes were very relaxed and it seemed they all loved what they did, which was nice to see for an aspiring game coder.