Journey of Onions
Week 4
Pitches After Pitches!
To force ourselves, to narrow down our pitch ideas, we split into two groups of three to combine or come up with new game design ideas.
Pitch 12
This is a pitch about puzzle game mechanics. The player has to manipulate a camera to solve a certain puzzle in the room
This is a mixture of Battle Royale, League of Legends, and Rougue-like genre. Each player will find a unique skill from a loot box and have to use that skill to become the last one standing.
This is a game mixture of strategy and RPG genre. You are the leader of an extraterrestrial race. The core objective is to take control one country at a time.
This is a developed version of an RPG, Racing game. It developed more on the occupation and skill side.
Pitches After Pitches!
To prepare for the Quarters, we are trying to land down on one idea. After two weeks, we notices that pitches are not condensing naturally. So the producer stepped out of the pitch process and became more of an external constraint by asking hard questions to the pitch and deciding what to do as a team.
This is a strategy game where you have to team up with others (temporarily) and become the last one to survive. This is a pitch that gives detailed game mechanics.
This pitch developed further from pitch #8. It shows a detailed and complex system design of the game.
This is a survival / scavenger pitch. It uses a weapon customization and a territory mechanism to limit the movement, while creating a gaming goal for players.
This is a new pitch mainly focused on the aesthetics and beauty of tech-art. This is a co-op game that two characters are tethered together by a chain and try to escape from the underworld.
Updates on pitch #17. It shows a core game loop design and personality and play styles to justify the core game loop.
This is a development from #18. Detailed player story is updated to show the game core loop precisely.
This is development from #19 pitch. Now, it focuses more on the co-op aspect and shows core game puzzle mechanics.
This is a new pitch. This game is a PC multiplayer puzzle, strategy game. There are 3 players with different abilities related to controlling time.
This is a pitch developed from #16. It shows a complicated mechanism better. There are two methods to eliminate others: kill or destroy the other’s crystal.
Final Pitch Process
This is the last pitch process before the producer decides on an idea, because we did not have a natural combination of team and an idea.
This single player, PC game setting in a post apocalyptic setting, where the earth has become unsustainable. Players have to strategize how to manipulate resources and create their transportable machinery to survive in this environment.
This is a platformer, action-adventure game. It is a co-op game with a story line of: An ordinary man and his daughter must escape from the organized crime world. In a Dystopian Mumbai overtaken by organized crime, a man and his teenage daughter must escape captivity of crime lords and expose their secrets.
This game is a PC multiplayer, puzzle, strategy game. There are 3 players with different abilities related to controlling time. One can sense the future and the past time to help find clues; One can stop the time for 10 seconds; One can rewind the time for 10 seconds. Their mission is to rescue people from upcoming crisis like fire, suicide bomber, shooting… They need to finish their mission in 5 min…
This is a PC, FPS genre combined with strategy. The goal is to eliminate others no matter by force or cooperation or deceiving other players. It is in post-apocalyptic settings, all players are gamers in a TV show. The rule is to eliminate others to win. The battleground is set in an abandoned town.
Post-Mortem of Pitch Process
We had to narrow down into an idea, because the pitch did not have much of a direction. As presented above, most of the pitch was dispersed instead of collapsing into one collaborative idea.
The problem was each pitch tried hard not to overlap each other. Trying to be unique prevented from us to have a collaborative team idea. Also we had to focus on the game stack.
As you can see from this diagram, the foundation of the story stack is the fantasy. But we were focusing on pitching World and Mechanics instead of pitching the fantasy. So, the producer had to extract the fantasy from each pitch and select a suitable one that every teammates are excited about.
What if we can make a moving huge castle that attacks?
This is our fantasy sentence that we are building upon on.
After Quarters
From Quaters we received a lot of great advice on our next step. There were so many questions for us to answer, it was hard for us to select which one to tackle first. We are going to use prototypes to explore a core game mechanics, and use reference images to explore our suitable mood board.
First, we set up our simple RACI (role) chart to give an authority to make a decision within a department, but stay flexible at the same time.