Game Design - Planning
It is a daunting task to build a 3d video game with a team of two...
Back to the drawing board is what they say when your challenges become harder and the scope of work changes. Either that or you kill the marketing department. Well, no. I wouldn't want to kill any marketing dept, especially because I have dear friends who do it for a living.
After some initial tests and more software research Danny and I have decided to take a few steps back and re-asses the goals of our project. Initially it was to be a hit the ground running effort to make a top down shooter with a simple game engine. XNA seemed to be a likely solution, but Danny has found it to be somewhat complicated in implementing some of what we want to do. That is not to say it wouldn't be useful for a 2d side scroller game, but we want to incorporate user controlled animations.
So this weekend we will have a pow-wow style brainstorming and planning session. The hottest topic will be defining new goals for our game and figuring out the pros and cons of using a more expensive game engine. It may costs us more than we had hoped to spend, but that may all be driven by how beneficial it would be to cut production time. We love games, and we would rather spend more time making it a decent, fun, and playable game. Not to mention that we would both like it to be stylized and eye catching.
This Sunday should prove to be very fruitful in defining a game story and charting milestones. More on that later... Meanwhile I have been going through a lesson book on Game Character Modeling and Animation; It is a great book to get started with and so far I'm enjoying it. Now about those game engines...
Back to the drawing board is what they say when your challenges become harder and the scope of work changes. Either that or you kill the marketing department. Well, no. I wouldn't want to kill any marketing dept, especially because I have dear friends who do it for a living.
After some initial tests and more software research Danny and I have decided to take a few steps back and re-asses the goals of our project. Initially it was to be a hit the ground running effort to make a top down shooter with a simple game engine. XNA seemed to be a likely solution, but Danny has found it to be somewhat complicated in implementing some of what we want to do. That is not to say it wouldn't be useful for a 2d side scroller game, but we want to incorporate user controlled animations.
So this weekend we will have a pow-wow style brainstorming and planning session. The hottest topic will be defining new goals for our game and figuring out the pros and cons of using a more expensive game engine. It may costs us more than we had hoped to spend, but that may all be driven by how beneficial it would be to cut production time. We love games, and we would rather spend more time making it a decent, fun, and playable game. Not to mention that we would both like it to be stylized and eye catching.
This Sunday should prove to be very fruitful in defining a game story and charting milestones. More on that later... Meanwhile I have been going through a lesson book on Game Character Modeling and Animation; It is a great book to get started with and so far I'm enjoying it. Now about those game engines...
Labels: game design
posted by ReyBombutron | 12:02 PM
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