Iteration Schmiteration

We're only in week two of senior year here at Champlain, and we're already pretty buried with work. Capstone keeps getting more exciting. At this stage, we are required to come up several game ideas to flesh out and pitch to our teachers and peers.

By the end of spring semester of junior year, my team already had a couple game ideas. More importantly, we knew what kind of technology we were going to be working with.

The Razer Hydra.

How many games have been made specifically for the Razer Hydra?

Zero.

Challenge accepted. 

In case you haven't heard of the Razer Hydra (it's okay, most people -- even gamers -- haven't), imagine a Wiimote... but better.

For a better and more technically accurate description: http://www.razerzone.com/minisite/hydra/what

Back to game stuff: 

Our very first idea was a cyberpunk Japanese sword combat game that took place in a city. It lasted a couple weeks. And then we were like, "Wait, no." 

Reasons why:
1. We'd have to model an entire city. An entire city. 
2. Japan is a pretty popular subject for games. I don't want to say it's cliche... (It is.)

By the end of junior year we sort of ended up settling on a gladiator-type game idea. The player would be in an arena, and monsters would be sent out to battle. Ideally, we would have liked to have several battle types (archery, magic, sword, etc.), but we ended up going with magic as our starting point.

Why? Easy. Our technology gives us the AWESOME advantage of a more immersive and interactive experience. We combined this with the fact that everybody wants to be the mage. (No I don't have the numbers to prove that.) 

How do you play a Mage in most games? Choose your spell and press a button to cast, right? Well with the Razer Hydra, we are able to design a system so hand movements trigger the casting. Which means we're one step closer to being a real Mage. 

Sweeeeeeet.

Well we played around with that arena/gladiator for a while. Around midsummer, Chris came up with a new design. As he explained, it combines soccer with that Mage system we already came up with. This is one of the ideas we actually ended up running with for this semester. Its current name is Mageball, but that's definitely subject to change.

Mageball is a 3D game. We're using Unity as our game engine.The game itself works just like soccer would. The twist is the magic. At the start of the game the player chooses to be either Team Fire or Team Ice. These teams are both balanced and their spell lists are identical, aside from the aesthetics (which would make their spells look like fire or ice). Then they choose from two other elements: earth, air, lightning, and arcane. These spells are balanced but not identical. For example, earth has a time slow spell and lightning has a ball magnet spell. There is both offensive and defensive magic. It can also affect the ball, the caster or other players.

This would be both a multiplayer and single player game, which means Alex has the load of doing both AI (Artificial Intelligence for Non-Player Characters/computer characters) and networking. 

Chris and Bryan have the tedious task of coming up with spells, the hand movements for spell casting, and balancing those spells. These things are more time consuming than you might think. Not only does it take time to just test the game, but to fix the things that don't work. It takes a lot of familiarity and intuition.  

This is also a pretty art-heavy game. We need multiple animated characters, all of the spell effects, a coliseum, seating, an audience, all other environment things, goals, a ball, and on and on. That's not including that concept art, which is the stage I'm at now.

Artists end up running into a lot of design problems. Well I guess it's not a problem, exactly, but I had to ask myself (and my team) a lot of questions. While I was designing the outfits for our Mageball players I had to make a decision. What is the ratio of Mage to sports player? 

Character design is really a tricky thing. SO MUCH about a game's design can be told through the character. Ignore the floating balls of ice and fire. Without those, can you tell they're Mages and also sports players? 

I wanted to find that perfect balance that would allow the player to be able to tell at a first glance.

I also ended up thinking about "home" and "away" jerseys from playing too much soccer and watching too much hockey. Those things actually came in handy for a game design! Who knew?

This was my second sketch for character design. Team Ice is in a home jersey: blue with white and ice blue stripes. Her banners have a symbol for Ice. Her shin guards and other "armour" are gray.

Team Fire is in an away jersey: white with orange and red stripes. Her banners have the fire symbol. Her "armour" is a gold-coloured plastic.

Maybe it's really segregational (that's definitely not a word), but I kept their colour palettes even through their hair. Mageball, and other sports games, are fast paced -- that's why they're exciting. So players should be able to identify a teammate immediately, even if they just see their teammate's head.

I will be playing around more with the outfits in the future, but Chris wanted to design the ball as soon as possible. My first concept was this: 

Then he iterated on that about five hundred times. Now we've got a lot of different ideas for game balls to choose from. But I am going to move on to concepting some environments.

We also have another game idea, but this blog post is a book already so I will give you a break and post that another time.

Thanks for reading!