AET Senior Design - Avian Problem

Today Alex and I worked on researching themes for our game, most of this came in the form of musical inspiration. I went through some of my playlists and Alex compiled a list of beats/lyrics we liked from the songs. Some of the artists we put into this list included: 2pac, Biggie, Ice T, Dr. Dre, and other rappers. After compiling this list we shared it with Michael in order to see what we can do in relation to our ideas on musical themes

This weekend I got in engine and started to identify packages that might be useful in prototyping our mechanics. Lean touch  - might be useful when doing controls, could ensure multi-platform prototyping until we decide on a final platform. Propulsion physics  - simple physics that could help with obstacles or projectile gameplay from some birds. Bird sprites  - bird sprites to use in place of in engine art assets for testing animation transitions, etc, from the controllers. Additionally I grabbed a few open source 2d controllers to test, right now i'm just focusing on creating custom controllers to make a satisfying game play experience. A few screenshots from this work session: looking at some scripts working on landing on colliders

Today I presented the final proposal slide deck to ~15 people in the Game Dev Lunch Club, including Michael Baker and David Cohen. Feedback was very positive, people enjoyed the theme and though it was pretty funny. Baker wanted to reiterate that he wants this game to start with a single very polished level with solid mechanics and game-play rather than a bunch of levels with bad gameplay. Cohen felt that some of our concept art might be offensive to people, and would like us to ensure that we play test early on in development with a diverse audience in order to tease out how acceptable our art is. Additionally Cohen said that he could see levels incorporating different playable birds rather than giving them their own separate levels. The multiple play styles on one level gives replayability and player choice. Link to slides

On Monday, 9/17, Alex and I prototyped mechanics ideas which we will be testing in the Unity game engine to evaluate how compelling those controls feel to the player. Attached are some of the whiteboards we created.

Today I made some rough sketches of what i'm thinking some of the gameplay might look like. Still solidifying ideas though.