Capstone Blog Post 2: Back to the Drawing Board

After presenting our initial ideas for what sort of games we were leaning towards making during the first week in class, we showed off our three initial prototypes. While we were happy to have prototypes when the other two groups in our class only had ideas by that point, it became clear that while talking with others within the class about the prototypes that a game was already made that was essentially one of our ideas that we loved the most and we needed to differentiate it more for it to stand on its own. The rest of my team was put off by this and for good reason once we saw the game that’s currently on the market with essentially the same idea. I was not dismayed however, I wanted to see where we could push our version of the mechanic to become wholly unique compared to that title. That title is a game called Black and White Bushido, a game which came out in 2015 that does what we wanted to do based off of the same inspirations funnily enough. Their game only does black and white coloring as their mechanic which was our initial plan to prove the concept of our game. What they don’t have is color blending or any color aside from black and white within their game. This also gives us the unique opportunity to capitalize on to see how their game was received and learn what we can from what they did well and what they didn’t to better our own game in the process. It was always in our plans to include color but now we have to employ it faster then we had wanted to to help our own game stand out and create different game play opportunity while we do it.

While the rest of the team was feeling down because of this, Mico my teams other designer took to working on our third prototype, a game we all thought had the potential for cool stuff. This prototype features players having guns with different bullets. The bullets make this game interesting because each bullet is elementally charged differently and when they collide they interact in interesting ways. For example, a water bullet puts out fire bullets, ice bullet slow your opponent, etc. Different bullets would interact in the environment in different ways, for example a fire bullet would hit a wooden bridge and destroy it altering the map permanently. While Mico was working on this prototype to see what we could learn from it and potentially take from it and include concepts from that game and put them in one of our other ideas, I worked on trying to figure out more ways to differentiate our color fighter from Bushido. Our professor offered some suggestions of how we could use the color aspect of our game more to differentiate it rather then just using it for a stealth mechanic. Mico and I have thought about it quite a bit and actually like the idea quite a bit of potentially combining the elemental side of things of the elemental shooter and combining them with our color game as was suggested by our professor initially. I added in projectiles to our color game to see how it would feel and with more work it could definitely work and I’m curious to see where we could take that concept. We as a team have decided to drop our open world game idea since it was too far out of scope for our time frame. Instead we have taken that time to flesh out the other prototype and seeing what we can do with the color fighter instead. I think it’s important not to put all of our eggs in one basket but to use our prototypes as incubators for experimentation which we could easily apply to whichever game we end up choosing. I think it’s also important to help in keeping the team motivated about the idea we were very fond of. We already knew as designers that we couldn’t keep black and white as our thing forever, that we had to iterate on that as far as we could go. The idea itself is already proven to work, we have shown that and so did Bushido, we just need to set on the right course of action to take that idea and perfect it and make it our own.