April 24, 2020
Personal Game Jam
Getting Started
Finalizing Concept Selection
I had reduced the number of concepts from 6 to 3 after creating the initial concept lists by removing all the options from pair B. I really liked most of these concepts, but they were a bit more involved than I was looking for for such a short term project. The main issue with the first two for me was that they involved drawing objects into existence with the mouse, which is a type of input I am completely unfamiliar with. This would have made them a perfect candidate for an experimental game project with 2 weeks of effort, but since I wanted to make significant progress in just two days, this would have set me behind too much. The last concept was more puzzle related, which is difficult to make effectively in this amount of time since they are so level design focused.
To help me decide between the 3 remaining concepts from my pair, pair A, I made really simple concept sketches to get an idea of how they would look. Here are those sketches:
Concept 1: Water and Space Pressure for Expanding and Compressing
This concept focused on the difference between the high pressure environment of water and no pressure environment of space. The player would expand over time in space areas, and compress over time in water. Each size has its own pros and cons and the player navigates through an area.
I eventually discarded this concept since it ended up being too puzzle related most of the time, which as I stated before, are a bit too much work to create in a small time period.
Concept 2: Flying Tree Spirit Fueled by Water
The player is a tree entity that uses water as fuel to propel itself through space to find minerals and resources to mine. Water and minerals can be used to grow and upgrade the player.
This rather simple concept was a nice mix of simplicity and room for expansion and growth, so this seemed like a promising candidate to move forward with.
Concept 3: Gather Minerals as Polyp to Feed Coral Monster
This game is played in two main phases: a small space polyp phase and a large coral monster phase. The player starts in the polyp phase, and can move between a space environment and an aquatic environment. They search for space coral hearts in the space environment to bring to the water environment so they can plant them and grow them.
The player then feeds these coral hearts to influence and accelerate their growth. They do this in two major ways: finding minerals to bring back to the heart and defeating enemies above the hearts so that they fall onto them. Once the coral heart receives enough resources, it grows into a coral monster which the player takes control of moving into the next phase.
The coral monster created by the player has its parameters altered by the various types of minerals and enemies fed to it during growth. For example, a certain mineral may increase the speed of the coral monster, while certain enemies may have increased the coral monster’s melee attacks. These effects are amplified by having more of a single type of resource being fed to the monster.
I put a lot of thought into this one, but ultimately was unable to come up with a satisfying second phase that made sense with the flow of gameplay. I think this idea has a lot of potential, but needs more time to commit to it to reach a good point.
Concept Selected: Concept 2: Flying Tree Spirit Fueled by Water
Ultimately I chose concept 2 to move forward with. It still needed work to get to an interesting point, but I think it fit the best balance of simplistic foundation with a lot of room for growth depending on how much time and effort I wanted to put into it.
Summary
Again, I was just underestimating the time necessary to put into initial concept selection and creation so that used a lot of my starting time with this project. I need to get better at determining when to let an idea go earlier and focus on the others.
Sketching concepts out is generally helpful for me, but being unskilled with Photoshop was slowing my process down a bit. I normally sketch with pencil and paper and that works well for me, but I want to get better at using Photoshop for this purpose since I think it will bode well for me in the future.