Review: End of Week 3

I've been on the course for 3 weeks so far with seemingly nothing proper to show for it. I feel as though I am behind already. There are a few things I should have done already: the door design and the block out of a few levels I want to create in the game.

My few posts so far have been seminar and contextual blogs, and none have been progress reports, so I'd like to start doing those. I have been reading some books which I've found helpful for the course and my interests in general, I've been watching videos online and doing quick sketches in my book and I've been making notes which have been developing my game idea throughout the few weeks, and I've also kept up with the lectures and lecture notes.

I've started a moodboard on Pinterest to try and give a feel to what I want my game to be. This includes the art style, the colours, some possible creatures and texts.

There feels like there isn't enough time in the day to effectively do and achieve what I want, but I will try, and I feel like I am doing better than how I was doing this time during the first year. Although my mouse is broken right now, which is unfortunate, but a new one should be coming soon!

My game idea:

My game is hopefully going to be a 2D slight platforming maze game. I'm hoping the art style will be paint like, with soft-ish colours, (you'll understand what I mean from my mood boards.)
The player will be controlling a form of light, whether it be a calm floating ball or a shooting light. I'm unsure whether I'd let the player customise a character before the game. This would mean that character would appear in cutscenes should I choose to do it that way.


The player has a choice on whether or not to save creatures, from separate coloured balls of light they encounter. Depending on how many they save on each level, the next will be a brighter level, with calmer colours, or the scenery will become more mountainous and/or dangerous and the colours will become darker and more bleak. This will be rather subtle, but still noticeable. This will be subtly hinted at the players, and the choices will affect the ending.

The player is travelling through a forestry area in an attempt to try and make their way home. I'd like to do cutscenes after some milestone levels to explain the story-line, and perhaps these will contain the hints.

On the journey, the hero is embarking on, they'll encounter balls of light and when they 'meet' or 'touch' it, there will be some animation of the light spreading, circling around or upwards around the character before forming a creature which follows the character's movement through the level. These creatures will continue to do so until the end of the level.

The player will encounter some obstacles, where it will be possible for the player, or the creatures to die during these.


At first, I wanted to create some realistic monsters, which you'd eventually find out the backstory to, as the creatures, but they all looked too childish as I did them by drawing shapes and creating them from my mind. So I think I'll try and do something similar but with real like animals as inspiration instead. The images included on this blog posts are very, very quick sketches, purely for the shape so I can then adapt it.

While I have these ideas and I think it's pretty cool, I think it'll be a while and/or take huge amounts of work to get to this point from where I am now.