Selective logging or partial forest removal is the practice of cutting down one or two species of trees while leaving the rest intact.
It has been chosen!
On Friday of last week, our client was in town to hear our team pitch the ideas. We were able to sit down with them and spent over two hours talking through each of the ideas. The meeting went incredibly well and they game lots of good feedback about each idea. The idea that was settled on was the journey of an Ancient Hero. Here are some notes from our conversation (these were thoughts from our clients, not team members):
– Certain gods could add positive or add negative effects more than others
– Question: The selection by the viewer doesn’t require the game to be installed? How does it work?
– Access to Twitch Voting
– Viewer as god is alluring
– Distance vs volumemetric fog vs particle system
– Effects applied after animation?
– Greek aesthetic would be good, conducive to gameplay
– Hand to Hand combat would be really difficult for rigging
– (what about MoCap?) The client just smiled and made a comment about “Oh, you just want to import motion capture rigs into lumberyard and attach them to models? … I don’t know as that’s been done before”
– Ranged weapons would solve the animation issues
– Perhaps through the game, the streamer would be able to gain an affinity to a god, allowing blessing to be more powerful and curses less powerful
– There are a lot of areas within the game to explore
– Creates a global cohesion as many people are familiar with the idea/concept of the Greek hero
– Lets the streamer know more about his stream, it could generate stats about who is using what
– Someone (viewers) get to play “god” (feels empowering)
– If the streamer can get a read on the clouds/gods, perhaps he can avoid or prepare for something (i.e. see the curse coming and avoid it)
Additionally…
– With Lumberyard being in Beta, look at the quality and ability to use it with Twitch
– Data will be important, make sure we capture what we’re doing so we can pass it on to other semesters
– We have a chance to do something new with the style of art that has been used on Lumberyard, so experiment and don’t do what is already done (with art)
– Avoid taking ideas from games currently using Lumberyard, explore its capabilities in new areas
The other ideas were talked about in deep detail, but the hero idea came out on top. As we discussed each of the three, the surfing idea fell off fairly quickly due to difficulty in a couple programming issues, and neither of the client representatives were very enthusiastic about the idea. The dungeon builder was pushed aside due to some major technical hurdles, and the limitations it would put on the artists to be able to produce highly creative work. Since both the team and the clients were on board with the hero idea, we are now putting it on our board and starting to outlines goals so we can go to the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) with something to show and talk about with Amazon employees. It’s a really exciting time for our team as we move forward into the next phase of our project.