Indie games are becoming more and more popular nowadays with many different and unique ideas. Coming up with a new and unique idea was a challenge but I feel that I managed to design something that is interesting, has plenty of room for a complex story and looked visually appealing.
The gameplay has many different elements which makes it interesting. It is a complex puzzle game with many different tests to overcome using the abilities that you have and as the abilities involve the elements, there is many new elements or environment interactions that could be added to make it a fuller game. The gameplay is also very unique which is one of the main selling points of an indie game. The game also mixes in action and fighting rather than just puzzle which gives it more depth and makes the game more exciting to play.
The weaknesses of the gameplay is trying to make the puzzles challenging enough as there is only a few elements available, but mixing these elements together could provide more of a challenge in the game or even making some of the puzzle very fast paced and having to react quickly to make it work.
The controls for the game would be very simple meaning it is easy to pick up and can still be mastered by more experience gamers. You would have the 1 - 5 buttons for switching the abilities and your simple movement, jump and crouch buttons.
The story is a very basic story meaning that it can be given a lot of depth and be worked on to make it more. It could be given a background story to the main character or even flashbacks that tell us the story up to the point where he finds himself in the lab being experimented on. The story does not need to be developed though to still make sense, a simplistic story has worked before and just making your way out of the lab makes sense and does not need to be developed further.
This type of story has been done before, not exactly the same way but the underlying baseline has been used in different scenarios but as I stated earlier, developing the story further and giving a background can make it unique and turn it into something very serious or even something comical.
The style of the game is very simplistic and colourful. The elements contrast very powerfully against the white and black of the laboratory. The white is supposed to symbolise the cleanliness and almost inhumanity of the lab. The emptiness of the colour white makes it feel very cold and heartless but out of this emptiness, the bright and vivid colours of the elements give hope to our character and for new gamers, it also makes the abilities stand out a lot better as well as things that you are able to interact with in the environment making them easier to spot and making the puzzles easier to try and figure out. However at the same time, the overwhelming of a lot of different interactions has to make the player think outside the box and come to a solution to the given puzzle making it still very appealing to the experienced gamer.
I took a different approach to the process than I usually do, my usual approach usually involves a lot of research and then putting down only the best ideas that come to my head. The research that I did, was through my own words and working, I took the time to play the games and put down in my own words how I felt about the game rather than finding someone else’s words and adapting my ideas around them. The majority of my ideas came to my head through different words and sketching out ideas that came to my head, even if they didn’t make a lot of sense. This made my idea generation very visual but allowed me to mess about with different colours on paper rather than finding them on websites like Kuler in my previous projects. I felt the differences in my process helped me but I still felt inclined to go back to my old ways and look for inspiration on the internet rather than looking for inspiration and ideas in my head.
If I had to go back and do my project again I would use a mixture of all the different techniques that I used in this project as well as others. I would do all the research in the same manner as much as possible but find a happy medium between my own research and other people’s. Sketching out any ideas in my head, no matter how mad they seemed was far more efficient as it gave me further ideas because they were on paper and not in my head, allowing my visually evolve them better. The mindmap with the words was also very helpful as it gave me a basis and starting point to generate my ideas. Putting images with the words, was again random and felt strange that I was putting any and all ideas and images that came to my head down on paper.
Overall I felt that I have developed my creative process as I still use some of my old techniques but now I have new ways of being able to do it which gives me a wider range of ideas to develop on.
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