Journal Weeks 1 and 2

Journal Entry week one

After staring back after summer and being briefed for 3^rd year at the beginning of this week it was time to start planning for the year ahead. I was originally going to be working together with Jack Moore again for this years project as it had worked out pretty well in previous projects, however we though having an extra person on the team would be a nice idea and have the areas of specialism slit up better. Sarah then agreed to work with us; we started by sitting down together and discussing any ideas that we might have had already individually. We decided to work on a narrative that Sarah had worked on for the interactive narrative project and develop it into a RPG style game. Over the week we have had multiple meetings to get ideas out and discus the direction of this project. We discussed things like narrative, which Sarah filled us in on, mechanics and platform and art style. For the role distribution Jack would be taking on a producer role and focussing on organisation and mechanics, I would be concentrating on art style and visual design and Sarah would be working on narrative and character creation. During the week I had also been thinking about ideas for my research report, I am not entirely sure what I want to write about at the moment but I know I want it to link in with my research for BA7. 

Journal entry week two.

The beginning of week two we began to solidify our idea ready to write our Learning agreements and plan a short presentation for the end of the week, showing our initial idea for this years project and Research report. We had settled on the idea of making a 2D isometric RPG using eastern RPGs as an influence for the game play, however we wanted to keep the art style away from the convention JRPG style and give it a more mature and western look. We wanted to avoid Anime/ Manga style characters that are the norm in JRPGs. We also discussed the idea of having it quite illustrative like an old storybook.  Towards the middle of the week we began putting our short presentation together, we each scripted a short section explaining what our main focus during the project would be, and put together some images that were relevant and reflect our ideas.

This week I also began to look into art styles and looked around for some existing games with styles that I would like to try for our game idea. I also purchased a few concept art books that would be relevant to my own work as well as the project. This week I chose to look at Asura’s Wrath which is and action driven game by Capcom, it is a strange mix of Buddhist mythology with science fiction. I looked at the early and final character designs, and the detailed, thorough character sheets.