May 5th - Ideation and Paper Prototype

This was our first week working on the project, which meant the first step was to do a lot of researching, brainstorming, and ideating. We worked together as a team to come up with possible ideas for our game, which is supposed to fall under the theme of 'Retro Future'. This is a broad category, so we explored each of our ideas to try and figure out the direction we wanted to go.

Working in class as a team for the first time, as we worked to develop our game ideas.

The idea we settled on was one that dealt with time travel. The basis of the story is that an inventor in a retro future called Professor T is working on creating a small stick-shaped time machine device, when his dog Chronus (our main character, the soon to be time dog) grabs it in its mouth and runs away. The game follows the dog as it then accidentally time travels, while chasing treats and running away from his pursuers. The dog thinks this is fun and doesn't realize that he's running through time, in which different eras in history will be explored.

In terms of gameplay, the game is a 2d platform game where the player controls the time dog. Running away from Professor T, the player chases toys and treats through various levels. Each level has different 'local' enemies to avoid (characters that are appropriate to the given time), while the overarching enemy Professor T follows you through each level. Getting caught by the Professor causes you to lose the game, but local enemies will only cause you to go back in time to the beginning of the particular level.

For this week, Luc worked on getting our game started in Unity, Gio worked on our paper prototype, and Chance worked on getting our website and development log set up. Currently we all are coming together to finish the paper prototype and prepare for our in-class presentation of our progress so far. The next steps for us will be to take the feedback we get in class and continue to develop our idea, working towards the creation of our digital prototype. A more detailed story, game mechanics, art and design work, and further website development will all be our focus for this coming week.

Currently, our only obstacle blocking development is time. We are in the early stages of our game design and are making good progress.