Fatty

Hello,
  Another week past and another closer to an awesome game. This last week we caught up (I think) to the rest of the class. In the end we had a hard time deciding whether to do "Fat Knight" or "Rampart Rampage" but we decided to do "Fat Knight". I would have loved to do Rampart Rampage since it offers so many options for further development and really a large playground of art and programming for the group. Personally I LOVE going so far overboard in my projects - and getting them done - just ask Lien Shen, my animations were so far past the requirements but I really love making myself stand out. Although in deciding on the game for the group I could not expect the rest of them to be willing to push it so far and commit so much time. I am a family man myself and I sacrifice a lot of sleep to get more work done without interrupting time with my boys. Don't get me wrong I still love the "Fat Knight" it is going to be a lot of fun and will give us a great opportunity to create a really well put together piece to showcase to potential employers.

  On friday we tried to have an artist meeting but Spencer got called into work and Dan just didn't show up so me and Kelly took a few hours to come together on some concept art we really liked. We combined mostly my body with Spencer's concept head and Kelly's detailing. We also plotted out a menu screen and thoughts on how we would like many things to look. As a group we nominated Spencer for artistic director  so all these ideas that me an Kelly came up with will still be filtered further in the group. I sent out a lot of the art we came up with to the group and some of the ideas and received some really good fead back.  I think I said everything and so I'm going to bed.

OK LETS TRY AGAIN

Ok so this time around was a lot better. Everyone really tried hard to stay in communication and have a descent amount of input towards the game. This week is a pretty cool concept it is essentially Castle Transformers. As far as my side of the work. I was in charge of coming up with the concept art for the main bad guy and the village houses that you must destroy. There wasn't much for reference images so I just kinda pulled it out of thin air. The failure of the last pitch kinda put a fire back into the side of the team that was lacking. I was happy cause last week I was solely in charge of helping with the idea and taking care of the group blog but since none of the concept art was coming in I had to do the one pager and take care of the blog myself. I like working alone most of the time but that isn't what this class is about.

Rampart #3

Alrighty

   So this pitch was a little rough. First the team had a really hard time coming together on any idea. It really felt like no one was willing to take anything that was proposed or even try to explain why it wouldn't work it was just ignored completely. It just ended up feeling as though no one cared about the pitch. Also the the communication after class was non-existent - but that is the difficulty of working with a group and learning to come together as a team. As a result I have come up with the "cobbled" one pager and hopefully a really good piece to present.

Concept for the "Fat Knight"

 Ok, so we all got really excited about this game. We think that the funny concept and character's behavior will truly sell this game - which is our intention at the end of production. So we all came up with ideas for the pitch and these are the pieces that I came up with. As far as research i checked out a few sidescrollers "Army of Darkness" & "Splosion Man" (which I tried to look at their use of comedy and strategy). Both are great games.
For my analysis of them Army of Darkness had a lot of great features. I liked the look, and the flow of movement and the additional features of the game. What I didn't like is the lack of control that you had over the character - and also that your minions had the ability to be more powerful than you. "Splosion Man" had a great look to it. They used comedic running and gameplay to create perfect balance of comedy that wasn't over the top. I loved the simple controls. The only complaint I can come up with is that some of the features weren't made clear, and I would have liked some kind of power ups and advancing features to make the character change at least a little between levels.

Next Rampart Game

Ok so we came up with a great idea for another genre of Rampart. It's a side scroller that involves defending two towers. You are the sole defender and you are a obese screw up. I don't want to give away the game though before the pitch but there isn't many games that relate to this. What to research this weekend from what I found is an App called "Army of Darkness" based off the great film - also any zombie game that requires you to defend yourself from any position. For now here is my knight that I think would be great for the project and I can't wait to pitch this in class and hopefully produce it.

Rampart Ideas.

So I came up with a few ideas for the rampart game. Rampart was an Atari game where you could select a castle and build a number of cannons to defend your castle. After you build the cannon the attack begins. There is very little control with the assault - you are solely allowed to direct the general direction of fire. After all is said and done than the objective is to fix the castle with essentially Tetris pieces in a timed amount then start the assault again. SO my proposal would take a different approach. I want to make a 2.5D castle defense strategy game. Many games like Stronghold and Robin Hood the legend of sherwood take on 1. Build a castle 2. Earn Money 3. Defend from the enemy/ Attack the enemy. I can't deny I love these games and want to use all these features but I wan't to make the medieval times modern. I want the castle to be filled with steroid jacked knights but with m16 of miniguns. The Castle will be upgradable from classic catapults to EMP catapults. The wall cannons will go from old school to laser cannons, the moat would be filled with crossing lasers or lines of chainsaws. The whole premise is upgrading by generations not just better medieval weapons. Also the enemy would be a robot army that would start from wind-up swordsman or the energy bunny with a malice to wind up with cannons and tanks and more. Also to make the game different you view would be posted behind the castle walls and when a wave of enemies come you can take a position in the gun turret or as a knight and help shoot down the bad guys.

My other idea is a castle defense that has characters with abilities. Like people who can manipulate metal and can deflect or stop cannon fire, or healers, fire benders, spell casters - but all with a limited amount so you need to use them strategically to defend and attack the enemy. This premise could still be used with my futuristic knights. Also it might be fun to rip off angry birds and when an wave comes you can switch to 2d and catapult stupid things and the enemy like a cow, or Monty Python killer bunnies. Sounds fun right.