Week 10: Beginning work on our pitch deck

We are still a bit in shock after receiving the amazing opportunity to pitch our game concept to Stadia, but we haven’t let our shock and excitement get in the way of making some initial headway into our pitch deck! This week, we focused on creating concept art of the game, as well as designing the

The Work This Week

Outlining Our Pitch, Creating Concept Art, and Updating Our Level and Game Design

Considering the task at hand, we have our work certainly cut out for ourselves these next few weeks, but we settled on the following tasks this week in order to get a very rough version of our pitch presentation up and running:

• Create a general outline for our pitch presentation before Friday
• Create concept art that communicates the overall tone of the game
• Determine a name for our game as quickly as possible
• Flesh out the interactions between Viruses and Cells from a game design perspective
• Update our map design
• Begin construction of our NPC and player character models

We were fortunately able to complete the majority of these tasks above. Jue created a couple versions of concept art, both of a stylized view of the overall game world, as well as some concept art detailing the states of both the viruses and cells due to certain actions in the game. Liangzheng was able to update the overall design of our map from the one we showed at softs, and we chose to theme it such that it looked like the Heart, which fit with our existing bloodstream mechanic we had created late in the first half of the semester. Wenyu was able to work on some initial designs for how viruses and cells would interact with both each other and the environment, which we placed in our initial pitch deck. And finally, we began the hard process of determining what name we want to give our game, although that will still need to be worked on next week.

With these things in hand and placed in our initial iteration of our pitch, we went into our client meeting looking forward to hearing Erin’s thoughts.

Client Meeting

We showed our client our (very) rough first pass of our pitch presentation, to which she made the following comments:

• In the interest of time, it would be better to present this game as a PvE experience where players are all white blood cells, rather than a PvP experience where one team is Viruses and the other is White Blood Cells
  • this would mean we wouldn’t have to balance and create yet another class for players to embody, which could eat up a significant amount of time
• Unclear what the scale of the heart looks like right now, as well as what is the overall flow of the map from beginning to end.
• Think about how you could utilize metagaming for your game, such as using a dev-run twitter account to issue states for people to join at a specific time and date.

Ultimately, we still need to flesh out a bunch of details provided in the pitch, as well as retool the game and our descriptions in the presentation to reflect that our game is now PvE oriented rather than PvP like we had originally planned. But other than that, Erin told us that this looked like a good first start, and she liked the concept art that we had created for our presentation as well!

The Plan for Next Week

We still have quite a bit of stuff on our plate, but we’re slowly chipping away at it week by week! For next week, we will take Erin’s comments into account, as well as our own desire to put together some mock-ups of some sort (whether that’s video, concept art, or something else) of our gameplay.

In summary, our work for next week is as follows:

• Switch our game concept from a PvP Virus vs. Cells conceit to a PvE one where players are all White Blood Cells who are working together to eradicate NPC contaminants.
• Create concept art for different game structures, especially our State Share game structure
• Continue to iterate on the overall level design
• Match the in-game VFX and aesthetics to the concept art created this week
• Refine VFX for the bloodstream from the one showed in our prototype at Halves
• Determine the final name of our game