Fresh off a restful summer, the Locanimals team wasted no time in getting the ball rolling on our project. With an ambitious semester ahead, we knew that we wouldn’t be able to make substantial, meaningful progress without a solid foundation from which to build.
Our week started with a jubilant rearranging of our room. Muscles were flexed, summers were discussed, and we reconnected as a team. Over our first lunch we walked through a production schedule for the semester; agreeing on the goals of each sprint and each week.
Early on we met with our advisors too, sharing the work we completed over the summer: User experience mock-ups, production pipelines, rough schedules, high-level game design documents, animation tests, and locanimal concepts.
The team came together again mid-week for a “Game Design Summit”, an almost-three-hour series of meetings in which we brainstormed high-level ideas for check-in systems, game themes, and battle systems. Most importantly: We expressed the values we wanted the game to embody and player behaviors to promote. Each idea was checked against these values, allowing us to see that sexier ideas might sound interesting, but would not allow us to achieve our design goals. We weighed the pros and cons of each idea as well–How simple was it to understand for a user? How difficult was it to achieve with our current project scope?
Out of our summit, we came to a consensus that our design process should be guided by simplicity–the game should feel easy to enter, with complexity emerging as they get deeper and deeper into the system.
This focus on simplicity influenced another consensus we came to. Our game’s theming and locanimal design direction would be a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek take on the people and creatures in our daily lives. We decided to avoid very standard (and quite overdone) fantasy styles of theming (i.e., elemental attributes, convoluted story worlds) because we believed pure fantasy creatures would be just plain weird juxtaposed against real world locations. Imagine collecting a flaming dragon when you check-in at the bank–a bit ridiculous, right?
With these key conversations setting the course, it allowed us to begin initial work on the foundational elements of our game. Tech began setting up a database and our server back-end; Art explored our technologies more deeply, refined locanimal concepts, and began the process of branding the project; and Sound began brainstorming ideas for musical themes and processes for creating effects.
Overall, the team ended the week feeling unified on the direction of the game and prepared to shift into production. Let’s go, Team Locanimals!