So, I'm making this new game. I wanted to post about it, partly to keep a record of the progress (and to motivate me to finish it) but also so I can talk a little bit about what we're doing, maybe get some feedback and give other people a little insight into how we're tackling things.
So, what is the premise? Essentially we're going for an arcade-styled top-down sci-fi shooter, with gameplay somewhere between conventional games of the genre (Alien Swarm / Alien Breed), and tower defense-styled games. We don't have too much set in stone right now, our current plan is to mess around a bit with gameplay prototyping in our pre-production phase and figure it out then. The general idea is that you must defend an objective against successive waves of enemies, using pewpew laserguns and limited deployable items like sentry turrets and mines etc, once you survive a certain amount of waves, you progress to the next stage.
How do you start something like this? Like you should start all projects, with a rough idea of the ballpark you want things to be in, a lot of research, and a design document. I've pretty much nailed down the process I want to use for small team projects by now, and I'll enlighten you as to what it is:
That plan wot I wrote:
Phase 1 - I have an idea guys! - Get stuff done on your own, get your design nailed and documented. I'm pretty lucky that I have another artist I'm working with here who is ploughing through design work with me. Stuff we need covered before we move foward is:
Basic game mechanics documented (General idea here, nothing too in-depth).
Narrative and World design mostly done (again we're talking broad strokes here, our game isn't very narrative focused but it is still important that it is a consideration early in design, otherwise it can easily become disjointed).
Art Direction mostly done, we want this one to be a little more detailed because we're both artists and it will really bug us if we don't have a strong framework to guide us later on. Also we're not using a common style so we need to do a little bit more groundwork.
Phase 2 - Pre-production - This is where the real meat grinding starts happening, we're mostly focusing on research and prototyping at this stage. This means we need to work out how to implement anything that seems difficult - this could be gameplay features or graphics effects. This is also when we knock out our first alpha version which we will use to prototype gameplay - it's going to be entirely placeholder artwork (think lolcubes and spheres to represent enemies etc) and used literally to try things out with the gameplay. We will however, make sure we have a particular room or section of the alpha build which we use as an art test - we will take that room through to 100% finished artwork to make sure that we have the art coherent and fitting the style we want.
If everything goes well, we should have dealt with most of the difficult issues here that we anticipate running into when we make the game. We also continue with narrative and game mechanic design during this phase, and make sure everything is documented.
Phase 3 - Production - This one is pretty simple, you've done all the hard work already, now you just have the time-consuming work. This phase is about 90% just churning out artwork and animations and stuff, polishing and fine-tuning any code that was written, bug fixing and generally making sure the game plays well (pacing and features etc).
OMG wall of text!
I know, right? So here's some pretty pictures to break it up a bit! This is the current iteration of our style guide, it is a (hopefully) quite close representation of how we want the game to look.
This took me a while, and a lot of research to get nailed down. I have a vision(!) and this feels pretty close to where I want to be in terms of artwork. I looked at a lot of games and movies, including stuff like Mirrors Edge, Moon, Star Wars, Tron Legacy and Brink. Hopefully it will be a strong framework that we can use to build coherent artwork for the game!
Why we're making a proof-of-concept first
We aren't making a huge co-op campaign straight away. What we're focusing on at the moment is making a proof of concept. Essentially, a very small part of the game which is complete, to prove that the idea works. We aren't too sure what we're going to do after that, we may just drop it and use it purely as a portfolio piece, or we may use the proof of concept to try to secure some funding and get it published. We don't know right now, and we don't care either. We just want to make a cool game. The point is that we're taking a manageable chunk to start with, so that if we do decide to keep working on it and try to get it published - we know what we're in for!
At the moment there's just two of us working on this, although we certainly will need programmers at some point and we have a couple lined up hopefully,this is still quite an epic amount of work I think. I'm excited about it, I'm getting to do a lot of things I haven't before. Being responsible for the overall art direction and production environment art for a whole project is quite scary. I hope I'm man enough for it
(this took quite a while to post, I may post more later on as and when there is more to talk about! Feel free to post any feedback)
for my mod i take over the dominant red and blue marking lines 
