Refining question I am seeking to answer + Presentation (23rd June)

Since my last post I have been preparing for my pitch proposal for this assignment, this will have me pitch my idea in front of tutors and peers to get their feedback on my idea. The main task that I had to refine for this pitch was what was the main question that I was going to be asking and hopefully answering with this project. As I wanted to focus on level designing for this project, it was key that I had a question that would make me delve deeper into level designing. So I decided to ask the question of ‘Can we use environmental story telling to navigate a player‘ and more specifically ‘Can these techniques be a replacement for direct methods of communication like waypoints and objective markers‘. I liked this question as it enables me to approach environmental story telling, which is a big factor when it comes to level designing and thus always me to delve further into creating levels that immerse the player.

After I gave the presentation, the main concern that was given was the scope of the project, due to the multi-levelled structure and task of creating a quality piece. With this I talked through the development timeline I had in mind and highlighted the use of the agile methodology and weekly sprints in order to constantly review my progress and stated that if time was a scarcity I would adapt the story to 2 levels instead of 3 allowing me time (if needed) to focus on quality over quantity.

Development timeline

The above is my development timeline for the project, the first 3 weeks will be planning and getting the concept of what I’m going to be doing sorted out. The next four weeks will be focused on development and this is where (if needed) the cut will happen and last of all the last 3-4 weeks which will be focused on testing and iteratively polishing the game.

Overall thoughts on idea:

Overall I am happy with my idea and am excited to start work on this project, the main concern I have for this project is that I need to think carefully about how long I want each level to be and the overall length of the game. Currently I am planning on the game being between 6-10 mins long with each level taking roughly 2-4 minutes to complete, this is because I want to make sure that the levels are linear/ not too big to allow me to focus of detail and narrative elements of the environment.

#Gam705MajorProject