We Dared to Do!

So yeah we decided to play with the idea and it become much more than what I thought it would. We ended up make a team for Dare to be Digital now '9-bit Idol', comprised of five (4 Designers/Artists and 1 Programmer) to create a game idea from my mechanic.

This became 'A Broken Time'.

We came up with the idea of the player playing a German spy who has passed after the end of WW1 and is now in limbo faced with the task of setting souls of the people, who's deaths he was responsible for, to rest and reliving their memories. You can see our pitch here:

So for this I was tasked with the creation of the prototype for the mechanic of placing the object as well as the creation of the Environment Art. With the prototype I played with ways of guiding the player to help the player notice where the object might need to be placed, this included things like dirty marks where an object had been and missing parts of trim on the the walls as well as more intricate wall surface patterning to show where objects and such can't be placed this seemed to work well as a visual marker when testing. I would like to see if I could make it a little more vague however, to make it little more natural but this could make it too hard to notice. Below is a short video of the placing prototype where you can see the markings on the wall. It also shows the 'Hud' I have been working on, this is where the images will be stored and then can be scrolled through to find the image that the player wants to use.

Like I said I've also been in charge of creating the environments for the pitch. I have been working on the style of the environments with the help of Becky Michalak the Concept artist on our team from the BA Course. We went with a quirky stylised sepia toned world working with abnormal shapes and distortion. She has then gone and created some BADASS concepts for some of the environments as you can see.

Art work by Becky Michalak

Art work by Becky Michalak

From these amazing concept I have been creating the graveyard area which will be the Hub for all the players tasks and story. The player will frequently be coming back here and finding more out about the story and the people who's lives you are reliving moments of. With the environments look and texturing I want to play with the old worn sepia photograph look that you often see from photographs from the early 1900's. However I want a little dash of colour to give the environment a unique twist. Below is a video and some imagery of the environment to date. I want to play with the area a little more and add some more features.

  That's all then. So now we will be continuing with creating this idea into something bigger throughout the next semester to build on what we have. Hopefully we will have the help of all the team as well.