Black space

Hidden within our city are doorways that become visible when sprayed with ink. The doorways teleport players to a new space that they must find their way out of. We wanted the new space to appear in direct contrast to our city so that when players return to the city they have a stronger appreciation for the visual aesthetic. We really liked the idea of a single cottage in the middle of a field or forest with the whole space cloaked in darkness (similar to the Black city concept image).

Small update

Sadly this week was a bit of a slow one. Hannah went on a scouting mission to a cement plant and snapped some great reference images of various industrial doodads.

We are still working on nailing down the style of our city. We've been looking at slums from Shanghai and Brazil. The claustrophobic feeling of the slums is something we want to capture with our own city. We also had a look at modern Greek architecture, mainly at how they use simple shapes and varied levels in their buildings.

Art update

We've scrapped the city in favor of a big, grey, industrial playground for the player to zoom around in. We're currently working out how everything should be rendered. I tried a more graphic style along with dirtying up the environment with some texture. My concern is that it gives the impression of being a real city, rather than just immitating a citys appearence. This could be a problem as paint + decals in a real city = grafitti, Banksy, hoodies, do not pass go do not collect £200 etc. These are references we would prefer to avoid.

A quick update

In the week since our last feedback session, we’ve been moving away from the back-story mentioned last time.

Last week we toyed with the idea of making this a multiplayer game, with the objective being to race to an end point by picking up on clues found in the environment. We have since moved away from this (as mentioned in the previous entry) but we’ve kept the idea of using clues for our latest idea.

What we’re now focusing on is keeping the game as a sort of sandbox that isn’t too objective-based, though there is still an objective that can be followed if the player wants to. We want to encourage the player to take the game at a slow enough pace to fully explore the environment, but at the same time give enough motivation to continue playing after the initial novelty of the mechanic has worn off.

As well as developing the idea further we made some more moodboards, wrote up a design document and did some tests in Maya. We are hoping to use Maya to make a vignette or two to showcase how the ink-spraying mechanic might work.

Concept Development

We focused our game design down to a first person single player exploration game. While we're not focusing on a heavily narrative driven game, we did however create a back-story for the world, both to help us design the city and also give the player motivation.

The city has been coated by a mysterious and highly addictive substance called Black. Black has twisted the citizens into creatures that are barely human, their reliance on it in every aspect of their lives has turned them into slaves that only exist to consume more of the substance. The ones responsible for introducing it to the city’s people are a large company, and they continue to grow not only by supplying the individual citizens directly, but also by using enormous machines to pump Black into the homes of citizens. There are some people left unaffected outside the city who want to sabotage the machines and slow the company down, but with only one miniscule point of contact with Black making them instantly addicted, this is difficult to do.

Note that this story is still very much a work in progress.

This image depicts the city completely coated in Black. The large factory in the background pumps black around the city through a massive network of pipes.
wip shots

Initial conceptart

While trying to think of an environment and world to house our mechanic in we quickly realised it was infinitely more satisfying to base our game on a realistic setting as apposed to a fantasy setting. As our mechanic allowed for the player to scale walls we wanted a setting that had lots of strong verticals and platforms at varying heights. We decided upon an industrial city setting.

While thinking of art direction, we were thinking of either bringing colour to a dreary world or being within a super colourful world and spraying black ink all across it. After some thought, we couldn’t justify the character’s motivation for the latter.

In terms of the style of the environment we have no desire to pursue a realistic style despite our realistic setting. We were thinking of having a bleached white city that the player explored and filled with colourful ink trails. These ink trails contrasted well with the bleached look of the city.

Initial Ideas

The past weeks have been spent generating game ideas for the project, mainly through frequent meetings and a lot of note taking and brainstorming.

Our initial concepts started to take shape by thinking of a mechanic first, and then dressing it up to make it more appealing. We went through many mechanics, the main ones we focused on being time travel and co-op play. Then, after losing our third team member and deciding these concepts weren’t strong enough, we decided to take a different approach.

Rather than think too hard about a mechanic straight away, we were encouraged to think more about what we wanted to say through our game, more about what we wanted the end result to achieve. After some more meetings and brainstorming sessions, “freedom of movement” was one of the main points raised.

The mechanic that we drew from this was as follows: The player rolls a ball around and can walk around on the line it leaves. We wanted something that had a focus on instant feedback and something that would become second nature to the point that you’d miss it in other games. This mechanic is obviously quite restrictive, seeing as the player can only walk along lines they’ve created, however the player would be able to roll the ball anywhere they liked.

After more thought, however, the ball mechanic sounded like it would be too cumbersome and might be difficult to control. This could be frustrating for the player as they rely on the ball to move around. Therefore, we removed the ball and in its place decided to give the player a type of handheld tool (something like a hose or water pistol) so they could simply shoot the line out in front of them, giving them better accuracy and thus more freedom. This altered mechanic also means that players will be able to spray lines up walls and along ceilings, giving more freedom of movement still. We have since created a world in which to use this mechanic, the story for which will follow shortly.