Hello everyone! This week marks the second week in development for Radio Galaxy's senior game project, Twoneironauts! It's always been an interest of mine to take up design. Originally I attended DigiPen as a designer, but because I found the technology behind games so much more appealing, I moved to RTIS. If anything I will be able to provide a great creative direction to narrow the focus. And my overall goal is to help bridge the gap that - I've felt has always been present to some degree in all teams - between the different disciplines. I'm a little late on these blog posts, but I just got the site up this week. So let's start with Week 00! Tutorial: Free Writing Since most of the game play is already decided for Twoneironauts (it is a sequel, after all) - the next important thing is getting it to look and feel right. Of course there will be tweaks to the game play, but more importantly than the game play is the actual selling point of the original Oneironauts; Theme, Art, and Cohesiveness. The original Oneironauts did not feature the best game play, it was adequate for a 3 month project. What was there was polished to an insane degree, however. That made it one of our more popular titles, but it's by no means are it's mechanics original. Now the theme, characters, and feelings it evoked; those were the bread and butter of the original Oneironauts. Twoneironauts has to match, or possibly exceed, in all of those things in order to be a true sequel. So how are all of these things decided? Well it starts with free writing. Just write anything that comes to mind and see where the pen leads you. It's a silly idea, one of the first tricks you learn in school, but it's honestly the most effective. Through free writing you'll come across all kinds of ideas, good and bad. As you write, if you come across something you know for a fact is either good or bad, highlight it in some way - make it really easy to leaf through the notes and find. You will reference these. What free writing brings you is direction. In it's lack of structure it allows you to experiment with several ways the story can run, several themes the story can explore, and several ways to tell them. And more importantly, which of these ways are good, and which of these ways are bad. Chances are, if you've run into a bad theme or character direction, it's because you started from something you swore would be a good idea. Later on, when you're trying to pull the pieces together, it's very possible to head down the same dead-end paths that you did while free writing. So be sure to outline what works and what doesn't. Stage 1: Sorting Through the Ideas After free writing, I mentioned that you will have several ideas, both good and bad, that you wrote through. This can help bring out the story you're trying to tell. What I was able to tell from free writing Twoneironauts is that the story I wanted to tell involved the following themes:
This seems pretty generic, but it's actually pretty solid in terms of what I should think about. The whole point of Twoneironauts is about friends gathering together to play a game. The idea is that they wont always be able to do that. Something will eventually get in the way. I want to tell a story with as few words as possible. I want the story to feel like an adventure, this means I want the people who play the game to feel connected with the characters. The characters are an avatar for the friends in the real world, so they should be friends in the virtual world. And through the story, the friends should still finish as friends, but the ending should allow an open interpretation for the player's own growth. Thus, the ending should give the player a direction in which to think, but it shouldn't spell out exactly what happened. Some of the things I learned about the story itself, in terms of what it actually is - regardless of how we tell it;
There are definitely points I wanted to do a Hypnos battle, but there is only one way a Hypnos battle would be possible, and it's using the old tired "puppet" video game trope. I think it would work effectively at making fun of the original design, and portraying change and growth of the development team over the years, so I'm excited for this prospect. However, it is not a core design element in the game. As such, it will be put off until last. Note: Later when this idea was mentioned, David Knopp discussed with me a great idea he had to call back to the original game's blatant sexism. Hopefully portraying on a deeper level that we have grown aware of these tropes and understand they aren't good, even (or especially) in imitation. The original story had some aspects of Greek mythology in it, which is rich and ripe for crafting into a wonderful experience. The original game capitalized on this simply for the title and final battle, but it needed to be taken further. This prompted a ton of research into Greek mythology, in particular dealing with dreams. The following are important elements I discovered;
This, along with stories about these gods and goddesses in Greek Mythology, is more than enough to craft a wonderful story. Stage 2: Getting Feedback from Existing Games After deciding many of these factors, we held an impromptu gaming session where we played a few different beat-em-ups (among other games) and discussed what we liked and didn't like. Underlined are things that we've since agreed on implementing OR fixing in one form or another. Everything else is still up for debate, or likely not within scope. Here is that list;
Aside from this, I also met with a few fellow DigiPen students, Joe Lubertazzi and Joe Sopko, who both gave feedback on the original Oneironauts game, and the direction we're taking the new game. Below are the notes I gathered from them;
Stage 3: Screen Mock Up (Painting a Target) If there's one of the things I've learned from ProjectFUN, it's that taking a group of people and uniting them in one general direction is hard. Luckily, I've also learned through ProjectFUN (and game team stuff, but honestly more through ProjectFUN) that the best way to move one mass of people in any general direction is by painting some kind of target. Screen mock ups are definitely that target that we need, or rather it's the first target. (This metaphor gets complicated, it's more like a way point system?) So this usually involves bad - very rough - sketches that I provide to get the core idea across to both the artists (Kiem Lam and Liz Pulanco). Of course there has been some minor direction prior - they've both made very good use of their time while I was working, and have produced some amazing art! (Spoiler Alert: Be sure to check theDropBox to see what they've made.) Here are some of those sketches... Character moveset sketches: Screen mock sketch: This was provided along with as much detail as I could muster in order to provide as much direction to the actual style that we should head towards. Artists referenced the material we had gathered, and - if you've been paying attention to the art blogs - you can see that that evolved into this beautiful first draft that generalizes the direction that Twoneironauts needs to head in order to be complete. We understand that this is by no means the final screen mock. There still is a lot of work to do on Twoneironauts. But this was a beautiful way to cap off our first week in pre-production. Hopefully we will have some more complete work to share!
Cheers! ~
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