First steps...

Well, now - hello again!  I'm back for another 8 year rant on how things are going!

Wednesdays lesson proved most productive, it saw Lab Rat Games settling on an idea for its first ever production an as of yet untitled fast paced 2D platformer, with an inter dimensional twist!

Marty the Gecko is fed up of Jungle living, an in a bid to find pastures a new he sets off on his own little adventure. Plot. Sorted.

The idea is that you can toggle between four different dimensions (using shoulder buttons, as we will be programming the controls to utilize a 360 pad), you can use these dimensional shifts to overcome a host of different obstacles, which will be unique to each dimension.

In today's session we will hopefully have time to discuss our dimension ideas and pick a solid four.  Once we have that settled I'm sure we will be in a good position to start on our 5 or 6 documents/prototypes that require completion by the  25th of Feb.

I made a generic flat stationary backdrop that could possibly be used for the basis of a level background, no platforms or obstacles in it, just the background - be prepared to learn how terrible I am at art :-(

The beginning

Well, we were set up into our groups on Wednesday - I say groups, we're now a Development Team, which sounds pretty damn awesome, haven't really gotten used to that yet. In the words of the guy from Bad Boys who isn't Will Smith, "Shit just Got Real".

So down and dirty then, our Development Team has been given the task of designing and developing a game, to a BETA standard between now and the end of this semester - no small task I might add - we have, however been given a helping hand in the light of the fact that we were provided with a 'theme' shall we say to base our game ideas on, a kind of, underlying concept to derive ideas from, for us that concept is 'Multiple Realities'.

I'm pretty damn happy about this to be honest because this is a concept that interests me in general but also, due to that fact that our final product must be derived from not necessarily a direct resemblance of this concept, there is a lot of scope an opportunity to make something very innovative and original from here, exciting times lie ahead and quite honestly I can't stop thinking about it.

Before I get into all that though it's probably worth mentioning that we hit a rather large barrier when it came to our first challenge, which was, coming up with a name for our studio.  Here are some of the ideas that were bandied around during Wednesdays lesson, it's probably worth noting that we wanted to use either the word 'games' or 'studio' after the words listed below:

eclipse
perpetua
lblue whale
m-theory
underdog
fallback
black hole
parallel
zebra
flux
lumen
obtuse turtle
note: direct copy from the list as was re-posted on our facebook group

After we failed to agree on any of the above selections we proceeded to keep pushing out ideas on our face book group, some ideas listed below:

NinjaSoft Games,
Spotlight Studios,
Groundhog Games &
Lab Rat Games.

Now I suggested we tried to come up with logos for any of the above to see if a visual representation would prompt us to pick a favourite, I focused on Lab Rat Games, which was Simon Gilbert's suggestion as I really liked it, and it was the first one that filled my head with images of what a logo might look like so I ran with it and came up with this first iteration:

After uploading this to our groups Facebook and receiving feedback on it, I have (about 20 mins ago) simplified the logo, and it now looks like this:

I am actually quite happy with this design and even if we don't end up settling on it I'm very glad I had a go at it, and am still favouring the title of Lab Rat Studios.


On the point of our task to create a game with a concept derived from the theme of Multiple Realities I did a little brainstorm of things that popped in my head, listed below:

Time Travel,
Multi-verse,
Portals,
Split Personalities,
Dream World,
Changed Events/Alternate History
Mixed/Recurring Events
Colliding/Merging Dimensions
Time/Dimensional Rift,
Tear in Reality,
Meet Yourself.

Then I had a couple of ideas about possible mechanics such as a weaponised reality bridge.

Well anyway, that's where things are for the moment, more next week!

Toodles!