Week 3

Brief

In our first lecture for this module, instead of having an ordinary lecture we had an interesting presentation given to us from a representative of Sony.

The presentation was about what game designers actually do and the industry itself. Which was relevant to the optional task they then set us, which was to design a physical game based on an existing video game.

I was very excited and keen to pursue this idea, I discussed it with my 3D character animation teacher (Steven Harris) and he seemed to like the idea, so I started to plan it out in note form. I then later discovered after chatting to my Portfolio lecturer it was possible to use this project for this assignment. Which would be killing two birds with one stone, which I was pleased about. But designing the game and researching the market may not be enough, so I may also create a short animation to promote the game.

I plan to create a physical game (e.g. board or card game) based around the popular Nintendo game Super Smash Bros.

The key to the design of the game is to capture the essence of the video game and put it across in the board game, if this is successful then the board game should be very likeable just like the video game is.

The game is an extremely frantic fast based fighting game. With many options, characters, items and levels.

Specification

• I must research the area of physical games.
• I must create a finished concepts of all parts of the game.
• The game must represent parts of the video game style and mechanics.
• A log of my work must be kept.
• Like always the game must be tested during development and the final product by me and others to see if it works.
• Care will be taken in the design of the game play as well as the game imagery but the game play is the most important aspect.
• Other than the board game concept work and art, other things that can be implemented to support this project are animations which can be created from the help of such software as, Blender, After Effects, Photoshop and Windows Movie Maker. This will develop my skills in these areas and with these software packages.
• An animation to demonstrate how the game works could be created, or an animation of an advert for the game could be created.
• In order to promote the game further, my own original character could be created to be used in the animation and in the game concepts, this will also help avoid more copyright issues than necessary and will mean a proper character animation could be created without having to copy or find a Nintendo character model.
• I can use the Disney style character I am also developing for my 3D character animation module.