A World Without Prototype

On Wednesday I created a mind map of ideas with a friend surrounding a concept that could work with multiple of the themes, then ironing it down and doing research on how it could be represented uniquely.

• Carnivorous coral/last chance for the ok coral

• Edge of box = kraken

• Eat things smaller than you, gain maybe 1/10 their size
  when you hit a milestone, transition to “a new area”

• Maybe 2-1 alternating different paths depending on ratio of enemy eaten

• Gain abilities on the path that are good or bad

• Random object generation

• Start on a pebble, then more pebbles, then metal barrel, then beach;
  move on to large scale areas

This is quite an ambitious idea – the first idea prototype was a “collect resources – bring to base” idea like Subnautica, but it didn’t sound very fun to play without the exploration aspect and good graphics (not possible since I’m working solo) so I scrapped it. The new idea is a 3-dimensional spin on the Katamari Damacy series: similar to the 2d games Tasty Planet and Agario, the player will eat other enemies and gain a fraction of their size in order to progress through multiple levels representing size stages.

On Friday I successfully implemented 3 dimensional player movement. On Sunday I planned the creation of a start menu/pause menu/options menu/controls display for Monday. After that, my next steps will be creating the pellet objects and their collision events with the player and then implementing sound effects as well as a slider or toggle for sounds in the options menu.

Research Report

On Monday I created a data set that identifies the genres of songs from various games. I considered doing intense quote analysis and finding lots of sources before the vast majority of writing, but I think I will find it easier to:

• Write about 5000 words of my existing knowledge
• Trim the content down into the most important points that tie into my original question
• Find quotations supporting my text, analyse them and provide possible counter evidence for each

In my year 2 essay I procrastinated significantly until fairly close to the deadline, so having a large body of work by the end of week 2 or 3 should help create a manageable workload and avoid demotivation. I may reconsider my strategy once I finish writing my initial ideas I developed over the summer break.

Time Plan

I believe the most productive method to spend my time will be:

• Monday: Free day – Program or plan one game mechanic, one paragraph essay
• Tuesday: Afternoon lecture – Plan essay in the morning, write a section in the afternoon
• Wednesday: Workshop – Essay writing in uni with help from peers
• Thursday: Free day – Commit the day to either essay or game dev depending on which needs more work
• Friday: Open studio – Game dev in uni with help from peers
• Saturday: Weekend – Chill day
• Sunday: Weekend – Making sure I have a plan for the next 5 days and doing any preliminary work that would help out