First Prototype and Ideation phase (21st Sep )

Today we looked at our first prototype game jam theme, which was ‘Beginning’. We looked at what a prototype is and what type of work we’re expected to produce during these prototypes.

This a really important session for me as it taught me about ideaisation techniques and their importance in the development process of producing a prototype. I also learnt from this session more about what a good prototype actually is, before this meeting I would have said that a good prototype would have good graphics and be quite fleshed out. This concept was totally wrong and what I learnt was that a good prototype can encapsulate many things e.g. Narrative, level design, game mechanics, art style etc. And that the idea of a good prototype is purely subjective.

My main focus for this first prototype was to make something simple (as this was my first prototype) and to get a feel for how to make/develop a prototype.

Straight after the announcement of our first prototype theme ‘Beginning’. I got to work creating a list of ideas that could work as a game concept. This process was mostly me just spitting ideas onto the page, after about 15mins of just writing ideas down I had 22 different concepts. I then proceeded to narrow down these ideas into the concepts that I liked and would enjoy both making and playing. I then had to look at what mechanics would be in each game and how feasible would it be for me to create these features. With this I decided to create the Concept of a Plant defense game where you would defend a plant against hordes of enemies (most likely is going to be flies), as the player you’d control a cross hair that would enable you to shoot the enemies. I decided on this concept as I have created a similar game before in the software Scratch [1]. I also new that Unity had the resources that I needed to make this game.

I knew that I wanted to make the game in Unity as this was an engine that I was most familiar with and the game engine in which I had the most recent experience in (finishing my last game in Unity in August).

[1] Mitch Resnik, 2003, Scratch[Programming Language], Available at: https://scratch.mit.edu/

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