Breaking the mold

As much as I love the gaming industry, it seems that we are stuck in a repetative loop when it comes to designing games.  It seems like every other game being released these days is a generic FPS with the same story-line.  Now I know that FPS’s are where the money is at these days, so I cannot really blame companies for pumping them out.  As designers go, though, we cannot keep depending on making these games over and over again.  I, for one, am getting almost bored with video games these days.  I cannot play the same game over and over again just with a different title.  I found this situation to get rediculous when the new PS3 FPS Haze went into production.  Looking at the character art, I noticed something…they looked just characters from Halo.  Yes some design aspects were changed around, but none-the-less they were Halo inspired.  I remember the first thing that came to my mind “so…they are taking designs from a game that took designs from another game.”

I just wonder, why can’t professional designers make the leap to bring out a truely original game?  You don’t have to have your game come out like everybody elses.  Katamari for an example, they went out on a limb and took a chance with this highly abstract game; and it was a commercial success.  Katamari proved that you can have a AAA game without having to kill something every five feet.  I feel that we as designers have an obligation to explore more abstract game concepts, because if we dont…our industry is going to get real stale really soon.

A needed vacation

After a nice trip back to Massachusetts it’s time to get back down to business. I have started work on a new portfolio site as well as started to develop a digital game that will be created in the Adventure Game Studios program. It will be standard point and click and be a psychological game of sorts. I’ll post more on this game as I develop it in the next coming weeks.

On a side note, I would like to say that I have become a huge fan of Michelle Menard, a recent graduate from Game Developments graduate program. I stumbled upon her website and all I can say is WOW. Michelle, who is currently a producer at Firaxis games, has such a unique talent. I always saw her working on projects in the Hall of Monty, and from what I heard from Brenda and Fu, was one of the hardest working and brightest students they’ve had.

I find it fascinating that I keep becoming fans of fellow students, first Dave and now Michelle.

Check out Michelle’s website if you haven’t yet, you’ll get to see what a portfolio site for a game designer should look like.

http://artemic.com/

systemFAIL

systemFAIL blog link

Albinolocalypse

Albinolocalypse blog link

Original game before we start the re-skinning of the game with a more serious IP.

Non-Digital concept #2: Disgeneration

A few months back the IP of “high school cliques” was being thrown around in Brenda’s game crit class, the group that had the IP came up with a fun game but I felt like they really missed a huge opportunity to make a statement on the dangers of cliques in high schools.

Taking this idea a few steps further I want to show the players many different points about these different cliques in high school.

1.  How cliques tend to divide and segregate people.

2.  How people in cliques are more followers than leaders.

3.  The dangers of alienating people “different” from you.

4.  How far these cliques will go to keep their image.

5.  How your actions as part of a clique effect peoples lives.

Each player will randomly fall into a clique at the start of the game (like in reality, you never know what kind of clique you will be adopted into.)  And depending on which clique you belong to you will have to act pending on their different rule sets.  The players main goal is to make it all four “years” of high school with as much popularity and happiness/self-confidence as possible.  At the moment these are the different cliques I came up with:

Jocks

Preps

“Nerds”

Rebels/Goths/Emos/Punks

and the loaner.

The loaner plays a very crucial role in the game.  He is designed to be the main target for players to go after to raise their own stats.  You might be saying “well, that isn’t fair for one player to always be a target!” but that is the point of the loaner.  Cause as I witnessed in my high school days, the loaner is always the target to get teased, even though they are never part of a clique, never hurt anybody, but they are always being teased and made fun of by every clique.  As I develop this game more, I will post the information and updates for this game in its own category.  More to come as I work on this game.

To continue with my style of playing with the titles of my games, I chose the name “Disgeneration” for a reason.  If you couldn’t tell, it is a play on the word disintegrate.  I believe that as society encourages teens and students to break off from each other into these social groups or “cliques”, then this country or society in general will never reach the level of unity they praise.

Non-Digital concept #1: Sanguis

The basic idea for this board game came to me at random.  With the current election going on the biggest issue is the war in Iraq.  Many people argue that it is just a war over natural resources and others argue that it is to help stablize the country after the removal of Hussien.  This game will take the idea of giving the players an idea of why wars are started, whether it’s for that territories resources, to take leaders out of power, or for globalization of their own country and their beliefs.

This game is not meant to be a war game, or soley to take over the world for yourself.  This game is being designed to give players the idea of the many different reasons wars are waged.

The title of the game, sanguis, is latin for “blood”.  I chose the title blood for this game for a number of reason.  Resources are the blood of any society, the blood that is spilled to gather these resources, and the blood that will be spilled to get more resources through war, slavery, or the cost of others.

I will post updates about this concept once I work out the mechanics and come up with a rough rule set.

Let’s get this started

As I enjoy the summer before my senior year at SCAD, I’ve decided to give myself a pretty hefty load of independant work this summer to strengthen my design portfolio.  The list of projects I’ve dedicated most of the summer to have been:

Writing three student post-mordium’s for Cops, Criminals, and Mexico, Albinolocalypse (while also redesigning the game), and systemFail.  I feel that have publications on my resume would really give me an edge against other designers during an interview.

Two to three non-digital games with artistic statements.  Brenda really got it into my head this year that games always don’t have to be fun.  It’s almost an unwritten law in games that they do have to be fun, but nowhere does it say it has to be.  I’ve found a new love in non-digital games with deeper meanings.

Finally a two digital games, one with the project tower Unreal 3 mod team made up of Nate, John, Spencer, Connor, and Gwen.  We are going for a custom game using the engine with a custom environment, character models, and if time is on our side scripting.  The other digital game would be a one-man, artistic platformer created and programmed in flash that will challange the user to try and percieve order from the chaos of the visuals.  The underlying artistic statement will be commenting on how people should make sense of their own reality through the chaos and confusion of the world we live in.  To not just give up and go with the flow, but to break away from the pack and do what they can with what they are given.

So it looks to be a busy summer for me, but I feel that having all these goals for myself in such a short amount of time will really help me prepare for the work load of the game industry.