First Big Updates

Week Three

(or "The Week That Grew Wings")

I had a productive week with Cannons game design! It started last Saturday (9/30) with writing a short narrative for the game. I was inspired by all what I had heard in our team meetings up to that point and decided to try to get it down as a story. The story isn't meant to be shared with the audience. My hope was that the inspiration I experienced would be present in the narrative and be shared with the team as further inspiration for the design process. Kind of like a mood board but using a story instead. It isn't meant to be taken as a "be all, end all". I want to share my excitement for the awesome game we're creating.

I also made the final roughs of our main cannons design. The main cannon will be the "main character" if you will. The one players will be exploring our game as.The cannon is based on a fusion of concepts up to this point and personified to give the audience a relation point of entry into the game world we are creating. Our goal is to make a personable machine that players can identify with in some way.

The rest of the week was a flurry of leaps forward in overall game and level design. I had a huge update for the game design document I talked about last week. This week is the first week of work after we nailed down more concrete ideas and figured out more of what would and wouldn't work. Pieces of the design are starting to fall into place.

Because the rules are becoming more clear, we have had a better idea as to what levels are going to look like. This weekend will be spent implementing ideas from this past week through a process called "white-boxing". This means we are making levels out of simplified geometry and objects to create a sketch of the levels design for testing purposes. Our goal is to "find the fun" and make sure our game is as much fun to play as we think it will be. I took a rough sketch at made a map in illustrator to detail the layout and make the white-boxing process a little easier. Sketchbook sketches are often a bit messy and making a quick vector illustration provides clarity.

That's it for this week. Have an awesome weekend!

Final Cannon Concept by Aram Wahler

Level Overhead by Aram Wahler

Level Map by Aram Wahler