Week 5

Alright, after a week and a half of hiatus, our group managed to get in a room together again.

We have been closing in on our game play:
It's going to be a side scroller with what we can only describe as "Interactive Mazes". These are those tricky situations you come across in Pokémon, where you have to move a boulder or nine and perhaps use an item or two in order to navigate the environment. Alternatively, the entirety of Portal is what we have deemed an interactive maze, though I am currently s'posin' that our interactive mazes would be less....teleporty-apparitiony
more puzzle interaction is pending...

Also zeroed-in on our plot, I now present to you, the most distilled version possible (it's visual, you'll like it) :


We are next trying to establish an opening sequence on par with CSI: Miami
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YEEEEEEEAAAAAAHHH!
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But foreal:
Linking all of are pieces together (we have several subplots that will be developed or trashed asap), defining our worlds in our newly-decided-upon 2D format, and finding different puzzle types that fit with our existing puzzles/concept.

And now...a Canadian cat

We're on our way!

Team MIA (Migdia, Ivone, Art) have successfully come up with the nucleus of their idea:

Imagine that you're a shy, awkward straight A student in your second year of college. Your life oscillates between the dull and the mundane, and though you'd like to fight back when the jocks harass you, or smile when she walks past you in the hallway, you never do.

Imagine that you're a rock star with the world at your charred fingertips. You shred the melody of a thousand naked women and men hold your jacket with the kind of reverence reserved for kings. When you walk into a room, curtains that weren't there before suddenly billow and pull apart, allowing you the most radical entrance to any room you ever enter.

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Imagine you're a shy, awkward straight A student who gets driven off the road and ends up in the hospital battling for his life.

Imagine you're a rock star who plays his operatic masterpiece before the world, only to collapse from too much "rock" in his heart.

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Imagine a transplant.

We will be developing a 2D fighter/platformer following a shy, awkward college student who receives a heart transplant from a violent rock star. Suddenly, he finds himself with dual personalities, one in which he remains his same insecure self, and the other where he can suddenly grab his world by the balls.

We want the setting to be tangible and accessible, a college town. We've even been considering playing up rock star "achievements" around a city modeled after LA. The world will be stylized but modeled off of something we all know so we can "get in on the joke" of that place (West Los Angeles).

The world itself will model off the particular personality that the character embodies at that moment: When he is his former self, the world will be sterile, dry, and mundane, an anti-climax. When he is in rock star mode, his vision will change and it will match the volatility of his rock star self.

We are toying with the idea of 1) Seeing particular items/enemies when in the different worlds and 2) How to trigger/justify the switch from personality to personality

Our best frame of reference for what we're trying to do is modeled off of Scott Pilgrim. There's some sentiment and heart to who Pilgrim is, but the movie, comic, and especially the game don't take themselves all that seriously. It allows for a great deal of liberty and fun in approaching the "coming of age" or "getting the girl" story.

Our goal for next week is to have our arc figured out. We're wondering about a girl (of course) and if there needs to be an ultimate showdown, ultimate goal alongside the promise of winning the girl of his dreams.

Ultimately, we're wondering, as well, if getting the girl has more to do with his rock star persona or if it is ultimately his acceptance of himself that will lead to her.

See you Monday!

Whew. What to say?

We are deep in the throws of xmind brainmapping software and hunger. I suppose that's a natural by-product of working on a game about food. We're drawing our game play inspiration from sources like Hotel Dusk, Myst, Heavy Rain, and the sly sexy devil, Professor Layton. This leaves us squarely in the realm of puzzle and mystery games. Agatha Christie is now our chosen deity (see left, Ms. Christie from the stellar Doctor Who episode, "The Unicorn and the Wasp"), though we're steering clear of such unreliable characters as Dr. Sheppard in The Murder of Rodger Ackroyd and sticking more to the models of Detective Hercule Poirot and James Qwilleran and the Hardy Boys.


We're dealing with a lighter aesthetic for our game, possibly leaning towards kid-oriented. We're excited by strong visuals, as in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Fairly Odd Parents, and even Pushing Daisies. The joyful nature of our world is making it somewhat tricky to really infuse a nemesis that sets the stakes high enough. Sure, you could be out burnanating the countryside, but why should I care when there are puppies and rainbows right here in the town square? The offense has to be big and personal. We're working on our Big Bad.

Alright. Off to Portos for some totally-game-related pastries.