Planning
Pitching games, choosing projects/groups
This week we were assigned to groups for our project. The game that I was assigned to was the game that I most wanted to work on: Memories of a Misty Seashore. I wanted to work on this games as it seemed like a very interesting concept with the focus being on the point of views of both the detective and the murderer. I was designated the role of Narrative and Story, but based on my strengths I believed I would be better suited to an artistic role. While I’m better with characters, since we already had someone well suited to the role, I thought that I would challenge myself by being the Environment Artist.
The three game pillars outlined in Maja’s GDD are: first, ‘Perspective switch’; second, ‘Kept in eerie and grim aesthetic’; third, ‘Tension and unease constantly kept through rich environmental narrative and story’. Keeping this in mind, our team decided on the following sentences explaining our planned vertical slice: After Alex’s wife, Jade, finds some of her mother’s old diary, the player takes on the investigation of the long past disappearance of his grandmother-in-law. The player finds important clues that reveal the nature of the disappearance being more sinister than previously thought, and the motives of the perpetrator.
We struggled to decide on a section of the game to focus on as; to highlight the perspective switch, we would have to show the end of the detective process, which wouldn’t make much sense without context. We decided that we would showcase both the beginning and end of the case with written context in between so that we could include all of the pillars.
The most important pillar to my role was the aesthetics, since the gloomy and grim look would be mostly carried through the visuals and background. Based on the GDD, I thought I would stick to a dark, mostly greyscale colour scheme, with some dark blue to seem more drab. I thought that I could also highlight the ‘perspective switch’ pillar by creating a different colour scheme for the killer’s perspective, which would also be 30 years prior, and therefore the mansion would be less run down.
I also created a list based on the GDD of the different potential environments, which we would later narrow down to the essential environments for the vertical slice:
- 10 hotel rooms
- hidden chambers
- attic
- crime scene
- shed exterior
- forest
- entrance to the basement
- basement
- surgery room
- dining room
- kitchen
- pantry
- common space
- lobby
- corridor
- stairs
- downstairs bathroom
- laundry
- storage
- garage
More team planning is outlined here on our team group blog.