Week 1 - Branding
This week we looked at marketing and branding. Prior to our lectures we looked at a selection of pages from a Branding book (source unknown) provided by our lecturer.
I found that writing out some of the quotes helped me to focus on the key elements of branding such as authenticity and building a narrative around your brand. This will be especially important for The Inked Ladies as the gameplay relies so heavily on story elements, so supportive marketing will help to create a fuller experience for our player.
Unfortunately I missed the lectures later on in the week however my teammate James is in charge of community management and social media so he informed me of everything we will need. For example we will need press kits and elements such as a dictionary of language we can use across our social media posts and a consistent colour palette. The palettes, dictionary and social media was all set up and devised by James Cook.
Dictionary of language:
Atmospheric
Quirky
Mysterious
Secretive
Doll House
Beautiful
Curiosity
Cornucopia
Whimsical
James also set up the social media accounts for the Inked Ladies game as well as buying domain names, theinkedladies.co.uk and inkedladies.co.uk`
Instagram @the_inkedladies
Twitter @ladies_inked
I started to research tattoo meanings and placements of tattoos on the body for our characters so that I could draw up the character profiles (even if these get changed later in the process we now have research to refer to):
Next this week I tested a narrative twine which lays out all of the interactive narrative options throughout the gameplay so that the core of the design is able to be implemented. I received good feedback from the playtesting sessions although I'm not particularly happy with the strength of the variations in text. I don't want to vary the options too much as we already have a lot to do on the project however I don't think the narrative will be strong enough by itself.
We also had talks from Bobbie Alsop and Claudia Thomas who both work at Manga High as well as alumni Abbie and Sid who are continuing their final year project, Maive. Bobbie and Claudia spoke passionately about Hurry Hurry Heal Me, their final year project from a few years ago. They discuss plenty of details, including having both soft and hard deadlines to keep on track, weekly team meetings and the importance of playtesting. They also spoke about the marketing side of the game design, using a variety of products like takeaway postcards and personalised T-shirts at events like Norwich Games Festival (and how important it is to have a version of the game to hand at various events for networking purposes).
Abbie and Sid spoke about how they tried to find industry jobs after university but after facing a lot of rejection decided to continue the development of Maive. They were both clearly very passionate about the story and they openly discussed all of the problems they faced along the way. One thing that both presentations stressed is the importance of time-keeping and balancing work pressures with self-care.
In the afternoon Claudia was kind enough to look at my portfolio and said that it seemed suitable for the level I was at. She said it was clear and offered me a few tips on how to change the layout to be more appropriate. She also suggested that with career ambitions for concept art it seemed like I wanted to be working with AAA companies more. I hadn't really thought of this before but I can understand how a role like that may only be suitable for an industry that can afford it (smaller companies need very versatile employees, not so much specialists).
I didn't get a chance to speak to Abbie and Sid in the afternoon but I messaged them later and they had plenty of feedback for our idea, notably how useful Yarnspinner is for people without much experience with coding, how the lack of mechanics helps to promote the storytelling and how Ideament could help with the planning of the process. They were incredibly kind and helpful with their feedback so hopefully we will be able to discuss ideas and potentially playtest with them in the future.
Following these sessions I spoke with our lecturer about the technicalities of making the game. This was my first time explaining the idea and so we tweaked a few of the gameplay elements. We discussed a fixed 'security' style camera with tank movements on the character (rotating in space) as well as breaking down the gameplay into animations and playable sections. We decided that instead of having an interactive narrative element, we would have a more environmentally-oriented system i.e. no text-based options but the player must find various objects in the environment which will trigger a cutscene. Their understanding of the story will depend on how thorough they are when looking around the environment. This is much more interesting gameplay as it leans into the investigative side of the storytelling allowing us to focus on the creative aspects of the game instead of coding the narrative.
