Bibliography and Ludography

Bateman, C and Boon, R, (2006), 21st Century game design, Massachusetts, Charles River Media

Eskelinen, M, (2005), Introduction to Ludology and Narratology, [online] Available from http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/anticolonial accessed on 5.12.2009

Fullerton, T and Zimmerman, E, (2008), Game Design Workshop: A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, Burlington, Elsevier

Game Theory, Billson, D, (2010), Building Transmedia Worlds, [internet article] Available from http://gametheoryonline.com/2010/09/29/transmedia-video-game-toys-comics-films-movies-tv/ accessed on 9.11.10  

Jenkins, H, (2006), Convergence culture: where old and new media collide, New York University Press, London

Jenkins, H, (no date), Game design as Narrative Architecture, [online] Available from http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html accessed on 3.12.2009

Murray, J, (2008), Hamlet On the Holodeck, The MIT Press, Massachusetts

Newman, R. (2009), Cinematic game secrets for creative directors and producers, Oxford, Elsevier, Inc

Salen, K and Zimmerman, E, (2004), Rules of Play: Games design fundaments, USA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Schell, J, (2008), The Art of Games Design: a book of lenses, Kaufmann Publishers, Burlington

Thomson, J, Berbank- Green, B and Cusworth, N, (2007), The Computer game design course: principles, practices and techniques for the aspiring game designer, London, Thames and Hudson

Video Games Blogger, (2010), Red Faction Movie part of THQ’s trans media strategy, [internet blog] Available from http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2010/04/05/red-faction-movie-part-of-thqs-trans-media-strategy.htm accessed on 10.11.2010

Wesley D/Barczak, G, (2010), Innovation and Marketing in the Video Game Industry: Avoiding the performance trap, Gower Publishing, Surrey

Wolf, M, (2008), The Video Game Explosion: a history from PONG to Playstation and beyond, Greenwood Press, United States of America

Ludography

Altered beast, [1988], Sega, [Arcade, DOS, Amstrad CPC, MSX, NES, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, Sega Master System, Sega Mega Drive/Sega Genesis, PC Engine CD, Commodore 64, Virtual Console, Xbox 360 (XBLA, ZX Spectrum)]

Assassins Creed, [2007], Ubisoft, [PlayStation 3, Xbox 360,
Windows]

Batman: Arkham Asylum, [2009], Rockstaedy Studios, [PlayStation 3,
Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows]

Castlevania, [2010], Konami, [PlayStation 3, Xbox 360]

Enslaved, [2010], Namco, [PlayStation 3, Xbox 360]

Fahrenheit, [2005], Atari, [Xbox/Playstation]

Infamous, [2009], Sony, [Playstation 3]

Myst, [1993], Broderbund, [PC]

Prototype, [2009], Activision, [Playstation/Xbox 360/Windows]

Resident Evil, [1996], Capcom, [Playstation]

Resident Evil 5, [2009], Capcom, [Playstation/Xbox 360]

Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions, [2010], Activision, [Nintendo DS, Microsoft Windows,[2] PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360]

The Last Express, [1997], Broderbund, [Windows/MAC OS/DOS]

Tron: Evolution, [2010], Disney Interactive Studios, [Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, Xbox 360, Wii]

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, [2007],  Naughty Dog, [PlayStation 3]


   

Conclusion

While designing my game, I learnt a great deal about chracter design and gameplay. I leaned a lot of new software such as Final Cut and Logic Pro, I hope to use these programmes more for my game designs in the future as I was quite please with what I had produced whiel using them.

My parallel blog on cohesive worlds also fed quite well into my studio work as it helped me to  look more closely at the worlds I was creating.

Overall, I had leant a wide range of technical and creative information in my research and I look forward to using what I have learned in my next brief.

Character flaws

I wanted my game to have characters that players would be able to identify and empathise with, especially the protagonist, as obviously the player would be spending more time with him than anyone else. In order to do this I had to make the character as real as possible.

Thompson (2007) agrees and states “The designer must be aware of any characters significance within the game. NPC’s who are seen briefly do not need much character development and may only need superficial details of their personalities worked out. However, the player character and major NPC’s do need careful consideration” (Thompson 2007:95)

Looking at game characters who worked and felt realistic, I found the best to be characters such as Jack Walters from 'Call of Cthulhu' and Similarly Carla Valenti in the game ‘Fahrenheit’ as she has several character flaws such as she is claustrophobic and predisposed to panic-attacks.

With the above in mind I designed my main character 'Thomas Wylde' to be flawed in the sense that he often has a defeatist attitude and wants to give up early on in the game until he meets another character who gives him a reason to keep fighting. I didn't want any trace of the dark, gritty anti-hero that seems to be populating the current market with characters such as 'Alex Mercer' from Prototype and 'Solid Snake' from the Metal Gear Solid games. Thomas would be idealistic and at times naive, he would try to see the good in people and trust them... which would get him in trouble. I also gave him a physical identifier which was a small wisp of white hair, at his temple.

Fun?

Now that I had the overall concept in place and knew how I wanted my game to look, play and feel, I went back to the question that Fullerton (2008) advises is an integral and probably most important "Is your game fun?" (Fullerton, 2008:312) Fullerton continues to explain that three main ingredients need to be evident to make the game fun, which are Challenge, Play and Story. I had designed the game with practical 'puzzle' element where's the player has to select the correct animal for certain tasks so this dealt with the 'challenge' aspect. I had worked out a simple play mechanic and control system for working through the game and this included exceeding goals and collecting in the missions and the availability of the animal data that the player could upgrade with and I had also looked at Story a great deal to create a rich narrative with characters who I believed had depth.

So it appears that technically speaking, my game would be fun. The only other way to test if the game would be fun would be if I had playtesters but this is impossible for obvious reasons.

Trailer

After reading how digital game trailers can be the deciding factor for a gamer, and how they establish the mood and style of the game I decided to try and make my own. (Wesley/Barczak, 2010)

I began by using After Effects and a lot of tutorials, after a few attempts I created a simple (not for me) title animatic for my trailer...

Title animatic
I began thinking that perhaps I had bitten off more than I could chew with my aim to create a game trailer to use with my game document as I had very little experience with After Effects and it was hard enough to create the above animatic, let alone a full trailer with sound that I would need to edit together as well.

My first problem was creating the audio, I had the voice work that I wanted to use and a sound effect for the transformation that I liked but I still needed a music piece to glue it together. After a lot of searching on Adobe Logic I found two that I liked and so I began the painstaking process of editing the video and audio together so that it would be seamless. I ended up with something far from perfect as there were a few glitches and no animatic of a transformation that I really wanted to show but it was something I liked anyway...

Wylde Trailer

Animatic

I decided I wanted my storyboard be an animatic and set out compiling some sounds for the game, I got a few more voice-actors to help out and patched some sounds together in Logic for what I had in mind.

I wanted to show realism instead of a hand drawn animatic, so I mainly used image manipulations for the scene. They took a lot of work and were probably harder to conceive than it would be a drawing but I wanted the person watching them to feel like they were watching as scene in a real game, or at least as close as I could get to that. Matching the sounds to the exact moments of action in the animatic was far from easy and often would be out of sync when I rendered them out so I had to try several times before the timing worked well enough to be able to seal both the sound and video together in Final Cut.

Eventually I had something that resembled an action sequence...

Storyboarding

Whether right or wrong, I had envisioned quite a few cut-scenes in the game as cinematic 'set-pieces' and as I had already done pre-viz images for screenshots for the game I decided to use a cut scene for my storyboard. (Newman, 2009.)

Following advice from other students, I decided to eliminate the use of quick-time events for the cut-scenes and just show an action sequence. Websites such as http://www.cracked.com/funny-5873-quick-time-events/ show why these 'QTE's' break up the flow of gameplay. For the cut-scene's themselves, personally I think as long as they aren't too long winded I think they can serve the game well and deliver the player from point a to point b in a way which may not have been possible without it's use.

After looking at some references such as this storyboard for an used 'Flash' digital game concept...

I began sketching out my cut scene, using just simple colors to just get the general idea of the scene. I wanted the scene to revolve around a part of the game where the protagonist follows a truck which has kidnapped one of the other people from the project...

On the storyboards, I tried to focus just as much on how the 'camera' would move just as much as on the action in the scene. If I get time I would like to try my hand at realising an animated version of the scene or perhaps doing a short comic book style version.

Voices

As I had started writing about sound in games for my other blog and we had the tutorials on sound, I decided to think more about the sounds I wanted for my own game.

I wanted to create a sound for the suits power-up and a sound for the change itself. Obviously the change would take more or less time in the game depending on when/where it was taking place but I wanted a sound that I could use for all changes that would just be stretched or shortened as needed.

For the power-up sound, obviously it had to be something electronic, something not too loud that would build into the change sound. I began looking online, especially http://www.freesound.org/ which featured some excellent power-up sounds that I would just need to alter slightly in pitch and in length to get the sound I wanted. I found the following sounds...

Sound sample 1
and

Sound sample 2

Which I think worked best.

I then began work on the transformation sound itself, which was a little more tricky as although it had to be an organic sound of muscles rending and bones shifting, I wanted it to have a electronic sound to it was well to give the feel that the change is powered by the nanobots. On Freesound I did a lot of searching and came up with the following sounds which I intended to mix...

Sound sample 3

and...

Sound sample 4

I wanted the sound to be distinctive but not a cacophony of sound it needed to flow.

While working on the sounds, I began toying with the idea of using an actual voice, as the changes are voice activated. As the game is set in the US I needed an American to do the voice so I reached out to a few of my American friends who were willing to do it for me but the friends I knew had accents that were too distinctive such as Texan or Southern. I needed a more American accent so I began to search online for people who could do the voice for me, eventually I came across these two sites...

http://librivox.org/

and

http://www.voiceactingclub.com/

Which were full of people who wanted to get into the voice acting or audio book industry whom were happy to read the lines for me. Before long I had a slew of people who wanted to 'audition' for me and a couple of them were perfect. I chose the person I wanted and got him to read the voice commands and a few extra lines as I had an idea for a short game intro.

Along with the voice for the main character, I used the voice actor again for the Wii version of my game and just got him to up his pitch for the younger version of the protagonist. For the most part this worked quite well and I got recordings for all of the voice parts I needed.

Transmedia

With my parallel blog on coherent worlds and transmedia I began thinking more about how my game idea would work as a cross media world. There are certainly possibilities to expand the universe and I had already devised a graphic novel with a crime noir feel that would explore the story of a investigator hired to find an elusive assassin who would turn out to be one of my games antagonists.

With the Wii version of my game I also devised an idea for a serialised animation in which a young girl befriends one of the games low-level enemies who can take the form of a single animal (in this case a tiger).

Although the core concept is strong enough, I didn't feel it was distinctive enough to allow for a fully transmedia universe so I wanted my game to simply be part of a bigger universe. One where several games were taking place and would interconnect feed into each other in terms of narrative.

Ch, ch, ch, changes.

I had decided early on that the transformations that would take the place should look good. I wanted the characters transformations to be dynamic and done in action, not stationary. For instance if the character would become a cheetah he would be doing it whilst running, his back would arch down and his hand turn to paws as they stride forward.

In doing my research I quickly learned that visual changes like that were done using morphing which I really wanted to avoid as it's far too 'cheap' and over-used. There were examples of people changing into animals on YouTube but always using morphing or cheating by the character going behind a car and coming out the other side as a different animal. In the 1980's the TV show 'Manimal' had a man turning into animals and it used prosthetics and practical effects. Manimal transformation but the change was never dynamic. It was always completely static.

I struggled to find a way to show my transformation, the best way to do it would be to animate it frame by frame but that would take far more time than I had. So I drew a few examples of my main character in the transformation. I had to draw several stages of the transformation, as drawing just one would either look like a person, an animal or a hybrid and wouldn't illustrate the actual process of the change.

It took a lot of time as I had to draw each stage as a separate detailed drawing. I also had to draw the stages in a slightly different position to give the impression that the character is in motion.

Although I liked these images I still didn't think they showed any motion, so I created two of them as gifs...

Click to view

Click to view

Pitch

Now we had been given the brief and explained that we will need to deliver our concept as a pitch to a panel, things had got a lot more terrifying as although I could articulate my design easily to myself, delivering to another person would be another story.

As with all briefs, I began with research and started online looking for websites that described digital games pitches and came across a couple that were helpful.

http://makeitbigingames.com/2007/09/how-to-pitch-your-game/

http://game-linchpin.com/2010/06/improve-pitch.html

http://www.newser.com/story/14654/selling-the-video-game-pitch.html

A few were very useful such as the advice offered on http://makeitbigingames.com which explained in detail what to avoid and what to elaborate on but our added issue was that we were being timed and not a lot of websites or books dealt with that problem. Alas, there were also very few forums that offered advice on this.

My first concern was to decide what was relevant and what was not in order to make my pitch more concise, so I collated together the bare bones of my story into a short premise as you likely see on the back of a digital game box to make the concept sound appealing and intriguing and started to collate my concept art together.

I wanted to have a few brief animated segments to show the panel to illustrate my game but I soon realised that it would take  longer to design and perfect a short animatic than I could afford to lose.

One of the main problems I faced was trying to illustrate in concept drawings the transformation itself, as showing the start and end of the change was easy as it was just man or animal and drawing a mid-stage just seemed top portray a picture of a man-animal hybrid. I wanted to show that the transformation was dynamic and in motion and steered well away from the morphing software as I felt this was a 'cheap' and all too often seen effect.

The best I could come up with was a single picture of consecutive stages of the change which I used for my pitch background.

Different viewpoints

Along with the idea that the game's protagonist would use different animal forms for different missions in the game, I wanted to go further than  this and utilise not only their forms but their abilities as well. So I started working on designs that would show how during the game you could use the selected animals senses in first or third person perspective. An example I thought of would be at one stage in the game you are plunged into darkness but if you become a bat you can easily navigate your way around and out of the room using the bat's echolocation. Another example is using the telescopic vision of the hawk to spot snipers and being able to track enemies using the wolf's 'scent vision'.

I liked this idea as it gave a new angle on the game and made using the animals forms more interesting.

Yes Wii can

Expanding on my idea that my game could have a broader appeal, I began thinking that the concept would also appeal to a younger audience so I decided to have two versions of the game, similar to what Atari did with their 'Ghostbusters: The Video Game' in that there was a more photo realistic Xbox 360/PC/Playstation 3 version and a more cartoonish Wii version. I wanted my game to address this as best as possible and make use of the Wii's younger demographic.

I began designing versions of my characters and premise so that it better suited the pre-teen audience and hit the 'Ben 10' style fanbase. I made the main characters younger and designed more cartoonish versions of the animals...

I eventually found a style I thought worked well for this idea and made a mock Wii game cover.

Market Research & Audience

As an action/Adventure game my game would have a predominantly male audience from ages 12+ but I wanted my game to have a broader scope than this so I started thinking about alternate versions.

With regards to Market research, there wasn't a whole lot of games on the market that were truly similar. Yes, there was a lot of highly popular Action/Adventure games, in fact according to The Globe and Mail http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/personal-tech/controller-freak/the-top-20-video-games-of-2009/article1405516/ the best selling game of 2009 was an Action/Adventure (Naughty Dog's 'Uncharted 2: Among Thieves) and an Action/Adventure was voted Game of the Year at the BAFTA Awards (Rockstaeady's 'Batman Asylum') http://www.1up.com/news/batman-arkham-asylum-takes-game

Highest selling titles of 2009

1. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS3, action-adventure)

2. Assassin’s Creed II (360/PS3/PC, action-adventure)

3. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (360/PS3/PC, first-person shooter)

4. Dragon Age: Origins (360/PS3/PC, role-playing game)

5. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii, platformer)

6. inFamous (PS3, action-adventure)

7. Flower (PS3, poetic adventure)

8. Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story (DS, adventure/role-playing game)

9. Forza Motorsport 3 (360, racing simulator)

10. Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box (DS, puzzle)

11. Punch-Out!! (Wii, arcade boxer)

12. Killzone 2 (PS3, first-person shooter)

13. Halo 3: ODST (360, first-person shooter)

14. The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (DS, adventure/role-playing game)

15. LittleBigPlanet (PSP, puzzle platformer)

16. PixelJunk Shooter (PS3, puzzle/2D shooter)

17. DJ Hero (360/PS3/PS2/Wii, music)

18. Resident Evil 5 (360/PS3/PC, survival horror)

19. Batman: Arkham Asylum (360/PS3/PC, action-adventure)

20. Borderlands (360/PS3/PC, role-playing game/first-person shooter)

So if it was released this year, what titles would be my competition? Well titles like Propaganda Games' 'Tron: Legacy', Activisions' 'Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions' and Konami's 'Castlevania: Lords of Shadow' would be the main Action/Adventure contenders of the year but I think that my game has more depth than these and because of it's almost puzzle-solving nature at times along with it's strong premise give it greater scope and wider appeal.

Gameplay

As I wanted the the transformations to be more dynamic and visible, I made the game a third person play. Although it was also firmly in the 'Action/Adventure' genre I decided that I wanted the game to be more cerebral than just another version of Sega's 'Altered Beast', where the transformations would only serve as a weapon. I wanted the changes to be relevant to whatever mission in the game is taking place, that each mission would require the ability of certain animal forms. For instance, for stealth the gamer would use the black panther or small cat form, for infiltration - spider, for speed - cheetah and so on. That made the gameplay more interesting and more involved. I needed to make the control system as simple as possible, as while researching transformations in games I had read that a large part of the problem for Activisions 'Transformers: The Game' was that they had made the system of transforming in the game to complex a control. So mine would be a simple button press and wheel selection process such as utilised in Arkham Asylum to select the weapon type and Radical Entertainment's 'Prototype' to select the power.

The game would be open world like Prototype as well but with a mission led path. It would be single player as well as the premise and set-up did not allow itself for play as a multiplayer game.

HUD:

Because I had used nanobots, they would also act as a good way to give a health bar readout, their 'charge' would enable a limit to the number of times the player could change form. I designed the character so he would have a readout on his wrist which displayed the nanobots charge  as well (it would be bio-luminescent and therefore organic and able to be absorbed as well). This health gauge worked well as the onscreen HUD and I worked in the form select wheel to the gauge so that it showed an icon of the form in use on screen as well.

The Story

For the next part of my design process, I began thin king about the narrative, who would have this ability and why, was there others? Who was he/she up against? Mark Twain once said 'Write what you know'. So I made the main protagonist a male in his 30's. I also decided that I wanted to take as much a realistic/scientific approach as I could to the game's premise, difficult as it is to believe I didn't want to add aspects of magic supernatural. Rather to ground it in science so I decided that it would be nanotechnology that would enable this ability. I then fleshed the story out a little more and decided he would be an intelligence operative that is recruited to a programme that gave him the tech. I then began a few preliminary drawings of the character to create his look...

Then the protagonist, well each hero needs a villain so someone with the same ability would work. I then added the uni-shifters, small low level 'minions' who are given the tech by the main protagonist but it's imperfect and they can only shift into one animal form. These would serve as the most frequent opponent in the game in the same way that the inmates did in Rocksteady's 'Batman: Arkham Asylum'.

As I was keeping the premise grounded in science I decided to add a suit that the main character would wear which he could transform in so as he doesn't rip his clothes all the time and end up naked when he changes back to human. I designed a body-suit which in the game would be made of organic materials which he would absorb into himself and add mass when he changed. I added a diode on the chest which he would tap and voice activate the change by saying which animal.

For the texture of the suit I looked at various animal skins and rubber textures, I liked the look of the octagonal pattern but that had already been done with EA's 'Crysis' and Sony's 'Spider-man' suit. So I finally decided on the look of shark skin, it's made up of denticles; almost teeth like layers across the surface.

Already I began thinking that the concept had enough depth in it to allow for some transmedia application, perhaps in the form of graphic novels or animated episodes.

Now I had the basis of the story and the character's I began to think about the play itself, how the game which I had now called 'Wylde' after the protagonist Thomas Wylde, would work for the gamer.

First thoughts...

Over the Summer I began thinking about what type of game I would like to make. My way of working is to concentrate on the story first as I think it's the first building block of digital games. Obviously others may argue that narrative is arbitrary but for me, my personal taste is for games with string core narrative. I always loved the concept of being able to change forms into different animals since I saw a TV show called Manimal back in the 80's...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugb_TIpPoWA

I thought the idea in the show was woefully unexploited, after all each form he would take would either be a) to get somewhere faster b) to scare his enemies. So I decided to use the basic premise and make it an in-depth game where the changes in form mattered and were relevant.

So my first task was gathering together an influence map, to reflect what kind of game I would eventually create...

Next up I would start thinking a little more in depth about the story.