From Concept to Reality

The Afternoon March 3, 2009

After I posted my earlier post today I thought that it will take too much time to finish the flash prototype, I didn’t feel that I got anywhere when I sat with it so I thought I could try an other method to develop the prototype. My choise became Adventure Game Studio which is a tool to make point and click games with. My concept on a prototype level sure would work as a point and click I thought and started to check some tutorials on youtube for the program.

Now, like 5-7 hours later I’m pretty much done with my prototype. I might add some music to the game to make it closer to what I wants with the game. But I hope that won’t take an awful lot of time. The tool is really easy to use and the code is real simple. You can without any problems mark places in the environment that will be shown infront of the character when standing behind them or lock the areas where you should be able to walk so the player can’t move around freely on the screen.

I will start to arrange some playtests soon to see if the concept gets to the user and so. Any volunteers? Just comment or talk to me on MSN and we’ll see what we can come up with. Have a nice evening!

It won’t be done in a flash March 3, 2009

I’m sitting with prototype number two at the moment trying to get something to work with Flash but it’s kinda hard when you haven’t built anything for the last couple of months that involves a lot of code. But I have my old game Ozelot on the run to look at which helps me to get up the code and the I can see how it is supposed to look like. It is times like now I’m glad I comment my codes =P.

I will probably spend all day doing this but I’ll return with a report later today or tomorrow. Now I have to go back to decrypt my old code.

Expedition White Mountain March 2, 2009

Today’s work have been to take photos for my upcoming prototype for River. Me and Lisa walked up on Vitberget and went out in the untouched snow to find some good spots to take photos. I thought it was a lot of fun, there was a lot of snow and sometimes I sank down to my waist with snow. We walked up on the road that goes up to the restaurant on the top of the mountain but we took the wild way down walking in waist deep snow taking photos on some places. I thought it was a lot of fun even thou the snow found its way into the shoes but still, it was a lot of fun. I’ll try to upload some pictures later but most of them I am going to use in the prototype.

The prototype will be built in Adobe Flash CS3 and will be built in scenes much like an old school point and click game. I will spent the evening and probably tomorrow checking tutorials on how to make it playable but I think it will work in the end and if it doesn’t work perfect is still okay since it is a prototype.

That’s all for now, thanks for reading and have a nice Monday afternoon.

Playtest #4 +some more February 28, 2009

YesterdayI had my forth playtest for the Eco prototype, I will upload a play test report on it next week. It was the first play test done over the internet and was done with the help of Johan Waldemarson. It was a rough first time but I hope the next one will be going better, I now know what I have to state the rules clearly and also set up some rules on movement.

Yesterday I also finished the third research and posted them to AK, she also picked the second concept that I should prototype and it is River. A relaxing game where you controll the melted water that flows down the mountain. I think I know how I will do the prototype but I’ll keep that a secret for a while longer but I will start building it on Monday probably. That’s it for this Saturday, hope you all having a nice weekend and thanks for reading.

Eco play test 3 February 26, 2009

Went to school today since we had a evaluation meeting for one of our old courses. I checked with some people if they would like to come in earlier to try out my prototype of Eco which a couple would like, and then I could try out there prototypes. We met up in school and I started telling them how Eco works and how it is played. The people that was there was Simon, Pelle and Isak, a thanks to you guys for taking the time to try my prototype out. Feel free to come with comments on it here or on msn. It was a successfull play test and I have written a report on it that I will post to the right as fast as I’m done with this post.

I also sent in an early version of the research of Eco to AnnaKaisa to see if it was what she wanted and it turned out it was, apperantly it was too well made nearly but that is never a bad thing so I’ll continue to research the four other conepts. Actually I only have three left since I’m done with another one of them.

I’m in phase with my schedule which feels nice, sure I got some research from last week to do but it’s nothing I can’t handle. It is only a little less then three weeks left on this project, feels sad to leave it but I believe I will continue working with things like this, coming up with a lot of concepts and work with the best ones and hopefully in the end sell the concepts to studios that want to develop them. I can actually see that happening which feels great. Now it is time for me to end this post, upload the play test report and then go get me something to eat.

Thanks for reading and please stop by again.

Play test 1 & 2 February 25, 2009

I have done two play test so far of my first prototype, one where I was the game master and the second time I played the game and let Lisa be the game master. Impressions so far is that I think the concept works even on a pen and paper level which is a good sign. It is hard to make it scary in this phase of a prototype but you can feel the sense of not seeing anything more than when using your vision. I have some things that I will change in the next prototype like the size of the grid paper, start and end point and stuff like that but so far I like what I have created. I’m going to try and create a software prototype in Excel and then let some other people try it out. The good thing is that the environment can change between everytime which helps the play value, it is worht playing it two times atleast.

The prototype is some what similar to Battleship for those who are interested in knowing what it looks like. I am suprised how easy it was to create a pen and paper prototype for a 3D game with a unique vision system. I might spend the rest of the afternoon creating a software protoype in Excel or I might get some more background research for my 5 concepts. We’ll see where I end up!

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more posts in the future.

Playtest #1 info February 24, 2009

I just finished the first play test for Eco, I’ve spent a couple of hours creating a prototype for it and now I’ve tested it on my girlfriend. The prototype became a paper and pen version since I saw an opportunity to create one of those. I was earlier in to creating software prototypes only but Eco would have been hard to create, atleast under a couple of hours, so I went with the pen and paper version instead. The downside of the pnp version is that it requires two players to work since one has to move the AI and also to work with the environment but I have some ideas on how to create a software prototype aswell. I might come back later with a playtest report of the first playtest.

UPDATE!!

I have now uploaded the first playtest report from my playtestings. Please read and comment on it if you like and feel free to line up for playtests, I think they can be done over any IM  client pretty much with some work from mine side.

Prototyping 101 February 23, 2009

I have just read the chapter about prototyping in the book Game Design Workshop by T. Fullerton, C.Swain and S. Hoffma and it looks like it can be two interesting weeks that I have infront of me. I still don’t know which concepts I will do prototypes on but I have come up with solutions on how to solve a couple of them already.

In the beginning of this project I was also really sure that a software prototype would be the one and only way to go but when I wrote my project plan a couple of weeks ago I added that I might end up doing a pen and paper prototype. Now I actually see the possiblities with a physical, pen and paper, prototype, I don’t have to code anything or make a lot of graphics to the software prototype which saves me a lot of hours.

The book also brings up editors as one type of prototyping and I also got really excited about doing prototypes and maybe later mods in different game editors. The Warcraft 3 editor could be used to create a prototype for my Lost in the Desert game which isn’t one of the remaining concepts but that doesn’t mean I can’t use it later on after this project.

I will spend the rest of the day reading the chapte about playtesting and maybe come up with some questions for the forthcoming playtest of the two prototypes I will arrange. I might post another post about my findings there in the evening, but only maybe. The future will tell!