This week the team was focused and goal oriented moving towards our final client pitch where we presented three shortlisted game ideas. Also with quarter presentations right around the corner, the team in focused on presenting the faculty with all that has been done and what’s about to come.
Client Pitch
We had a lot of potential ideas from our brainstorming sessions. We had narrowed down to three potential ideas. For these three ideas the team now started doing extensive research. All the artists and the designers on the team focused deeply on the game design and the level design elements for these games. From a technological stand point all these ideas involve technology that we have never worked on before and could be a potential risk for the project. To hedge our bets, the three programmers on the team split up to take one challenging task from each of these ideas to do a quick proof of concept in better understanding the technologies involved. All this was done in order to prepare for our client pitch presentation on 8th February. The pitch presentation can be found here.
Pitch Idea #1
The first concept called “Rivers” teaches about pollution, drought and desertification in a very direct way. The players use laser pointers to create puddles of water on the screen with the eventual goal of providing villages with water from a permanent water source. The game is a puzzle game with elements like factories which pollute the water sources near them and forests that spread if they are near water bodies and turn factories into eco-friendly factories. The players need to collectively create a path from the main water bodies and feed water to multiple villages. The game can be played by potentially hundred plus people.
Pitch Idea #2
This concept is called “Friends” which focuses on players forming connections with strangers trying to find relationships that are beneficial for them and their friends. The game is played with multiple iPads’ connected to a big screen where players control their character moving close to others and forming connections. Once a connection is formed, each player will find out if the relationship is beneficial for them or not and may decide to severe the relationship. The game inherently represents humans behavior towards relationships, trying to hold on to strong ones and all this while forming new ones as well.
Pitch Idea #3
This is a novel concept which uses human voice as input through smartphones and tablets. The game is essentially a territory game where players belonging to different countries need to expand their country’s boundaries and population by singing in low and high pitch respectively. They can attack neighboring countries as well. But the game takes a turn when a virus soon starts spreading through different parts of the world. If a country attacks another which is infected, the virus spreads to the attacking country as well. At this stage the entire population of the world (all the players) need to unite and sing in a high pitch in order to completely eradicate the virus. There will be special events like UFO sightings where every player would have to be quite or they would get a attacked by the UFO and lose their population.
New York Visit
The team will be visiting our clients on 15th February along with our adviser Jessica. This would be a really good experience as not only we get to meet our clients but also visit New World Stage where the festival will be held in June, 2013.
That’s it from Week 4. See you all after our quarter presentations next week.
Mayank