Week #1: core experience and visual references

Welcome back to my weekly blog post friends and foes,

Today I am going to talk about the activities I carried out through out the past week. My job was to define the core experience of the game, based on the initial high concept and the ideas discussed by the group, refine the initial high concept document and provide visualization for what we wanted our game to look like.

Defining the core experience of game is one of the most important aspects of game development. Having a well-defined core experience allows teams to focus on only on features and mechanics that enhances the game with respect to what it is supposed to be; It should not however, hinder creativity of the team and should focus on the sentiments we want the player to feel. Some companies, also define or expand the idea of core experience with the term fantasy. This means that whenever the player enters in contact with the game through any media for the first time, .e.g., watches a trailer or reads the name on the game's box front cover, he should be able create expectations for that game and image what it is all about, with at least partial accuracy. The group focused on five sentiments for the core experience, some of them are directly related to one another and some may yet be removed, as having too many objectives may be counter productive: freedom of choice, familiarity, fear, outrage and exhilaration.

Following these footsteps and to better define what the game should look like, I argued about the importance of the art style, lightning of the scene and sound effects. Explained how these would be approached and why we would not set any goal for sounds effects due to time constraints. As a whole the group decided that we wanted to create a cartoonized yet moody environment, where the player is allowed to feel some of the previously mentioned core experiences. Some sources of inspiration are Life is Strange, Thief of Thieves and Invisible, Inc.; You can see some of the image references I posted on the deliverable document below:

Thief of Thieves, Art Style

Life is Strange - GUI

I do not want to bore you with all the details, I'll be back next week with more exciting news; Hopefully I'll bring you some custom-made blender assets that we will use for our technological feasability prototype!
See you then,
Francisco Barros