Week 2 - The Tale of Another Nameless Protagonist

I’ve had yet another busy and productive week. Mid last week I finished my 3 pose drawing of the female main character for Pivotal, as seen below, as well as a few brief paragraphs detailing her backstory. From there, the group discussed what kind of mechanic s should be featured in our game, and how the basic structure of each puzzle should be designed. We all had our own opinions as to what the game should include, so we tasked ourselves with coming up with a few puzzle designs each for GDW.

 I was surprised how quickly I was able to come up with some ideas, but their more realised designs took time. For example, the third puzzle was particularly tricky because I had to work backwards, determining each block’s end position first to guarantee that a solution was possible. Looking back I wish I had planned out my first puzzle a little better, as there was no room to write the step-by-step instructions on how to solve it, and certain elements seemed superfluous in the later stages of its design. The second puzzle is probably my favourite, as the spinning blade should show off the game’s 3D capabilities, but I also like how there is a quicker solution to puzzle 3 if the player can figure it out.

I also began to model my character, though the process is slow going. I think I may have made my design slightly too detailed, and it’s impeding my progress. I think it has potential to look good when it’s done though, so I’m pressing on.

Samples

The following is the character background I provided for the female main.

The female main character of our game is a nameless protagonist, to suit her role. She is a factory worker at a plant located near her hometown, a small, dirty place made of iron and cobblestone. Like the never changing tide, its generations come and go, all seeking refuge from poverty under the unforgiving weight of the metal press. She has been beaten down by reality, her mind growing stagnant from the monotony of everyday life at the factory. The factory itself produces metal. It’s hot and humid during the day as the bodies within struggle to quench the world’s never-ending thirst for gears, piping and bullets, and bitterly cold at night, as the wind moans through the empty, iron halls.

The main character is 25, though her birthday hasn’t been acknowledged, much less celebrated, since the stress of their lives took her parents from her; her only family. Her childhood was a modest one, spending her days playing with the other local children and seizing any sort of education she could out of her father’s collection of books. She enjoys bright flowers, pale-blue brooklimes mostly, the colour of her late mother’s eyes, and her favourite treats are the tiny chocolate cakes sold just down the street from her home. But above all else, she values fresh air and sunshine, a luxury not oft afforded to those who toil in the factory to earn their keep. She’s shy, keeping to herself mostly, although some days that’s more from lack of amiable company.  Having succumbed to her fate, and knowing little of the world outside her own, her ambitions are mostly day to day. Her dreams are of short, quiet days where she can relax and be happy, as opposed to seeking the now forgotten freedom that she once craved.

Pictured below is the completed 3 pose picture of the female main character.

Week 1 - It Begins...Again

                We’ve had quite a productive week to start off our new project. We assimilated into a group early into the first full day of classes and immediately begun working on an outline for our game. We quickly settled on a horror/steam-punk aesthetic and a gravity based puzzle-platformer with Metroid style exploration elements. With the huge influx of ideas coming from all members, the scope of the project seemed unlikely to succeed. This in mind, we reined ourselves back and took an objective look at what we wanted to accomplish in the given time frame, and decided to cut a few features right off the bat to avoid spreading ourselves too thin. We left our first meeting satisfied that we’d created an accomplishable framework for a game we could be proud of.

                The next day, our team grew with the inclusion of Mario, and another meeting was imminent. With the inclusion of another talented programmer, we were able to re-include some of the previously cut aspects of our design, as well as rework some of the mechanics that we were less enthusiastic about. Our scope reached its zenith, but we realised what needed to be done in order to succeed. We declared then that we would push anything deemed to be “frill” momentarily to the side and focus on getting a solid base of functioning mechanics working first. We felt that this would give us the strongest possible start, and the best chance at achieving our ultimate goal. At the end of the meeting we convened to come up with a name for both our game and our group as a whole. For our group, we decided on proTesters, and for our game we went with Pivotal. The game’s logo will emphasise the word “pivot” in the title, as most of our puzzles will be based on the gravity and physics capable through Havok.

                As it stands, our game is about a worker who has fallen into a rotating factory. In order to escape, they must solve a series of puzzles in order to find the machine parts necessary to rotate the factory 180 degrees, at which point they can fall out of the hole from which they entered.  We will focus on instilling a sense of fear and isolation while presenting our chosen theme, despair. As the game progresses, our main character slowly begins to feel the intensity and hopelessness of their situation, and descends into madness. Apparitions and figments of their imagination plague them as they struggle through the torturous factory, transfiguring into horrendous beings as the main character’s mind erodes.

                For our first assignment, we were tasked with designing a character that would eventually be modeled for our final product. We had to draw the character in the traditional “T” pose from the front, side, and top orientations. Along with this, we had to include at least 10 images that were used as inspiration for our design, as well as a couple of paragraphs describing the character (things that could not be represented visually). The following images are what we came up with, along with some preliminary drawings.