New Project

On monday we started a new project. Our new project is to design a game for the iPod, iPhone or iPad. 

So inspired by the idea of the new project i did a load of research over the last few days and found out that there are a few things that lead to popular game...

1. Create / choose your own character. 
2. Edit your characters appearance.
3. Have real time waiting eg. crops harvesting times, ect.
4. zombie game (not original but sells loads)
5. Simple is more, but very hard to find something catchy. eg. Angry Birds, Doodle Jump, ect.

These are just a few things i researched that created good games. But themes of games that are overly popular follow...

• Zombie games.
• Cafe games.
• Farm games.
• jump/platform games.
• ‘Flick’ games.
• Sports games
• Village games

And areas that dont have not been over used too much are...

• si-fi games.
• school based games.
• pokemon style games.
• Grand Theft Auto style games.

Anyways after evaluating the available possibilities, i figured out that the two area that are good areas to focus my game in are the school based game and the grand theft auto style games, pretty much free rome games. So i am thinking about combining the two and creating a school/GTA style game kind of like the PS2 game called ‘Bully’ but with a lot of differences. I still need to work out how it is going to work. but so far i have a few ideas.

• there will be a selection of starter characters.
• the idea is that you have just started school and you have to survive and become popular.
• there will be two different types of reputations you can work towards. Teacher/ parent reputation ( going to classes staying out of trouble increases this). And pupils reputation (doing stupid stuff in class and accepting and completing dares or challeneges)

So far i have done a few designs for the starter characters. They are as follows:-

Board game concept designs

these are just some of my board game box concept designs and characters

New week....Lots of progress!

I have no excuse for lack of posts, other than my 'hectic' university lifestyle. But because of my lack of posts I have made a lot of progress with my project. I have truly been a busy bee. So last time I posted I was talking about our new idea, the virus game, it is developing well but we are having a few problems with a cirtain members of our group and the lack of work and because of that and the continues changes of game ideas, we have dropped behind the other groups. This annoys me just because i am overly competitive. That aside and my rant over, i have produced some really good work towards the game. I don't know if i mentioned this but I come from a very fine art background, like i have never used adobe produces properly. So as i started getting into my course i invested in adobe creative suite and a wacom tablet. both i have to admit are amazing, i am really enjoying using them and i am fining them pretty fluid and second nature to use now. Anyways i have been given the role of the box design for our game which i am thrilled about because that gives me a lot of freedom in what i do. i have almost completed with one design which i am pretty thrilled with i would post it up but (because of my mild ocd) i refuse to post it up until it is 100% complete. but ill will when i have a couple done post all of them up because at the moment i am half way through 3 and almost completed 1 design so far. At the moment i am trying to figure out what background would suit the game. My ideas so far is like viruses and antibodies floating around inside a vein or artery. It hopefully should look pretty sweet . Anyways research is going pretty well. My friend Amy shows me these really cool children's toys of different viruses which have a similar style design that my designs so they make very good research. Anyways thats all for now I'm sure I'll post a couple more times this week because i hopefully will have a lot to talk about throughout the week.

New idea... New inspiration

Today we had a massive team/group talk, and once again we came up with a new board game concept which is better than our last one. Our new idea is a territory/domination turn based game where you play as a bacteria , virus or antibody. This new game can have up to 4 players and the idea is to to compete the other players, the player with his pieces left on the board is the winner. this game kind of reminds me of the flash game pandemic 2. As for my input into the game so far i have been doing a lot of character designs for it. To be honest its going pretty well i did some okay designs today tonight i just need to digitalise them and nee ten them all up. 

http://www.crazymonkeygames.com/Pandemic-2.html

Frustration and irritation with our first project, Board game

i have just started my first big project at Norwich University College of the Arts (NUCA), our project requires us to design and create a board game. simple as i sound it has turned out to be very tricky. We originally went for a monopoly themed games with the idea of buy/ winning properties and placing them around the bored and the aim was to cover the entire board in your properties. this game we all like but none of us where completely happy with it because it was very similar to menu other games. This is when it all got complicated. So after uni one day we all sat down together and literally banged our heads together. A sandwich,  pack of wotsits and a diet coke later we stumbled across the idea of our chess like game. Our new game was completely strategic there was no luck factor whats so ever, this made it a lot more of a challenging game because then the player was in complete control of his/her downfall or victory. the idea of the game so far, very much in early stages at the moment, is that you are either an attacker or a block. and the aim of the game is for the attackers to get to the other side of the  board without getting blocked in  by the blockers. Kind of a cat and mouse chase game, or a game based on getting the king in check mate with only a handful of pieces left. Anyways when i have some more information on the game and photos and stuff i will upload them and it will make a lot more sense then...