Beginning the Project

During the beginning stages of the project, our first task was to brainstorm ideas for a game, we were initially stuck between two ideas; a horror-survival game in which the player has to collect a series of items without being caught by the enemy, and a dodgeball-inspired, turf-wars style shooter. At first we were set on the idea of a horror game, this would allow us to produce realistic assets, within an eerie setting, and would also encourage us to create a storyline for the game.

However, after a lot of thought we decided against this, horror games are particularly hard to make well, and we were given advice to choose a game with a lower scope, since this usually has to be cut back further into development.

We decided to create the dodgeball game, and began listing out core mechanics, the aim of the game, how the overall aesthetic would look, and our target audience.

Key Aspects of the Game:

- Players must fight to win the island; each hit which a player gets against the opponent will move the barrier further onto the opponents side

- The rules will follow similarly to the real-life version of dodgeball; there will be a limited amount of ammo, and you cannot cross onto the opponents side, hence the barrier

- Players will be able to dodge left and right, alongside a sprint

Target Audience:

- We predict a target audience of both genders, age ranged from seven to young adults

- We can target our game to a broad range of players, by marketing it as a 'party game'

Game Aesthetics:

- 'Party Games' typically have a stylised, 'cartoonish', and colourful art style, which reflects the nature of the game - hence we have decided to choose this style for our game

The early stages of our game development can be shown below, these are some simple whiteboxes of how the map would look, although at this point we were all very unsure and couldn't as a team what we thought would look best.

We were hoping to achieve the feeling that the player was on a fun, tropical island; I'm not sure that this was portrayed very well by the looming cliffs around the side of the map - this will take a lot of reworking during the project.

Group Roles:

Project Manager: James Holt

Lead Artist: Harrison Snatt

Texture Artist / Programmer: Abbie Hipwell

3D Modeller: Owen McNally

Programmer: Jade Taylor