Week 1 Sanctum Infernum

This week I joined a group comprised for 4 Birmingham students and a couple Gilford students to come up with a game Idea. After brainstorming for awhile we came up with a first person 3d labyrinth puzzle game with a lot of Greek mythos and aesthetic. After spending sometime refining it we decided to see what Guildford had made on there part and they had came up with 3 games. It became a discussion between a alien farming game and the labyrinth game. We decided that it to stick with the labyrinth game. The plot of the game was a Greek god hosted an event where people from all over Greece would enter a labyrinth and the first to reach the middle and kill the boss that is there would bring prosperity to their land. We incorporated one of the other ideas that Gilford had which was a souls like Greek game which would have been used as how the player fights.

Concept Art and mood board picture

After pitching the game our idea didn't get pick and the game that got pick was a turned based adventure game where you play as a priest who was cast to hell where you fight different types of demons in search of a way out.

We started by electing leaders for each group so one for design (James T), one for art (Aaron), and one for music (Jack) and a project lead (Shannon). Then the design group (which I was in) started working on what the level would look like and how the combat of the game would look like as the are the two most important part. Our design lead created a google document so that we can put our ideas for how the game will look and play on a design level.

Then we started coming up with ideas, the art lead came up to us asking what the level will look like so the art team can start concepting. After discussing how the ideas we decided that the player would start the demo out in a dead worm like animal and enemy would enter through the side of the worm and try to kill you. I brought up the idea that the player may have their weapon damaged or look a bit broken to show that they have fought before and maybe that's why they are in the mouth of a demon.

For the combat I pointed out that we need to make sure that the game doesn't feel repetitive when you fight. So we came up with not only the player has the choice between long rang as bow or a blessing (which is a holy magic a priest can use) and melee but the player can take the weapon of the enemy they have defeated and take their wepond which has its own abilities (i came up with the idea that the player would get corrupted if they take the wepound). After further disscusing stuff like camera angle.

Me,the project lead, another designer and the audio lead when to work on the backlog for the game on trello. Our project lead put a section for each group, so while the aduio lead was work on the audio backlog me the the other designer (James H) and the project lead worked on filling out the back log for design. After that I helped the the audio lead work on their backlog. I sent a message in the design group chat telling them that they should look over the backlog and add anything we might of missed. Finally we looked at what roles are needed for this game and wrote them down.

DESIGN BACKLOG

AUDIO BACKLOG

Monday the design team had a meeting lead by design Lead James T to discus what was going to be in the game. In the meeting we discus what the combat of the game was going to be. At the moment we decided that it would be a turn based RPG combat style where one move for example healing would take one turn and now the enemy would attack. I created a prototype for how that might look. We also added a defence mechanic that would make our game different from the rest which is inspired by DDR (dance dance revolution) which we are thing about using for defence giving the player an option to dodge an oncoming attack.

On Wednesday me and the design lead and James worked on making the DDR (dance dance revolution) mechanic and making more interesting and fun because how we had it the player would just attack do the DDR then then enemy would attack and this would become boring fast it also meant that the overworld in the game was pointless as their was no reason for the player to explore making the game really linear as players would get bored for fighting demons and want to just complete the story and fight the boss. So after a while of brainstorming we came up with the idea of having a chain mechanic that would allow the player to combine items and weapons to deal greater and unique damage. To do this type of damage you would need to go to the overworld to get this would give the player a reason to do explore the overworld. This also opens up the game to allow for the player to create their own way of attacks.

Conqecti