Sunday, 18 November 2012

Journal Weeks 4 and 5



During the fourth week I continued to work on research for both the game and my research report, some of which crossed with each other. I have found this to be useful as I can tie in my research for the game design project with the research report. As major part of our project idea was to bring a western style to a Japanese RPG mechanic, I did research into RPGs as a genre. I gathered examples of both Western and Eastern RPGs and wrote about the differences between them. What makes the two genres of role-play games different from each other? I decided that I wanted to write my report on my progress in developing a westernised style to a JRPG as it would tie in with my studio work and also give me a chance to analyse my own work during the process.

At the beginning of week five, Sarah one of our team members dropped out of the group, as she wanted to take her story and focus on making it a interactive narrative. Being five weeks into the project, this was quite a large bump in the road for Jack and me, as we had to come up with an entire new narrative for our game in one night. We simply didn’t have any more time to spend on it other than that. We kept Jack’s mechanics and the art style research that I had done, so not everything was wasted. I then went back and altered my learning agreement accordingly and finished it ready to hand in.

The new narrative that we came up with was an idea of an underground civilisation that had lived in this giant country sized construct for thousands of years, to escape the ice age and constant snow storm that raged on the planets surface. There would be multiple races each having unique characteristic making them good at different things.  The lower down the construct you are the better off you are. If you have to money to be able to live lower down, where it was warmer and less under threat from surface creatures, then you are lucky. The people towards the top of the construct live in cold cramped conditions and don’t have access to all things the lower levels might. Our protagonist would come from the higher levels, but his fortunes change and him and his family are able to move down a level. There are still some things that need working out but, we managed to come up with a base to work with. 

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