Week 1 - Welcome to Wild Wild Animals

To start the semester we chose which projects we wanted to develop from the previous semester's game pitches. As a result the four games chosen were; 'Eden', 'Going Home', 'Wild Wild Animals' and 'Altoyism'.

Following this we each had to pitch for a position on a team and explain what we could bring to the project as well as what we wanted out of it. I decided to pitch for the game 'Wild Wild Animals'. In had originally wanted to be team leader but as someone else was chosen, I pitched to specialise in 2D art for the game. I found that I had followed this idea when it was being made in the first semester and was the only idea I thought I would get the most out of with my current skill set as well as being able to push my skills in certain areas further.

I was lucky enough to be put on this team with the provisional role of creating the UI (User Interface) and turnarounds for various elements of the game.

With the team set, we started by reading through the original Games Design Document to better understand the concept we were to develop. Below I have attached key notes of various points from the GDD:

Following this we had a 'Question the Creators' session later in the week allowing us to ask the creators of each concept specific details about how they envisage their ideas. This is less to do with aesthetic and more functionalities of the games themselves (i.e how they work).

It was then decided that as we were still working out our capabilities, work times, to-do lists etc. that I would develop some mood boards for key areas / ideas for environments across our vertical slice. Below is the mood board document:

I also stepped a little further into the project and started to visualise some of the areas which may be 2D in the game. For example we had discussed that the town area is that which the player will return to on a regular basis between battles for upgrades, recruitments, customisations etc. As such I developed a first idea of how this may look to be able to communicate my ideas in the next few weeks.

Visualisation of town area in artistic format: