Concept Challenge

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Together with four classmates I did the Concept Challenge where we got a randomized narrative that we had to build a game around. What we came up with was a 2D platform game for mobile devices. I'm going to share the presentation here with you together with the first part from our development diary.

Tuesday 30th

The first thing we needed to do was to create a story to build our game around. We decided that we were going to generate a random story through a writing exercise. The process started with getting a paper and letting everyone in the group write for 30 seconds and then passing the paper around. For example Rasmus started writing his story and then passed it along to Tom after 30 seconds, who then both read and continued the story. But before passing it to Sigrid he had to fold down what Rasmus had written so she only read Tom’s part of the story before continuing the writing. Because of that no one knew the entire story or what the others had written except the one before them.

Having done the exercise we got four different stories,  we decided to take one of them that was random but still consistent. The story was about a tree, possessed by the devil who eats children.We started thinking about how we could make that story into a narrative and build a game around it. So we decided to make one of the children the main character of the game instead of playing as the tree or something evil. We started discussing what mechanics our game needed in order to fit the story. The conclusion was to make a 2D platformer game for mobile devices.

We decided to make it a mobile game since this is not something you usually find on App Store, Spooky Tree have a deeper story and feels darker and creepier than for example Candy Crush or Farmville. But it could still be something that you casually play when you want to pass time. You could play our game while you are on the bus or the train or when you are laying in bed having a hard time falling asleep. It is not a hardcore game nor something we expect people will play for six hours straight.

The deadline for the game idea is Wednesday next week so we do not want to stress with it and to really take our time. Also so we have time to focusing on other school work we have other than this assignment. We could have decided to do it fast and just get over with it but since we had time we wanted to really do our best and work with our ideas. Our group also decided to write small notes about what we did each day. Later on we wrote down in this diary what accomplished and described more into detail what we had decided and why we made those choices.