Big Game Project

This blog is a part of the Big Game Project, a course available at Uppsala University - Campus Gotland. The course is ten weeks long and ties in with the GGC (Gotland Game Conference) which is sometime in June. The course could be seen as a examination for all that we are "supposed" to have learned. During these ten weeks each group are going to produce a game from a pre-designed concept. These concepts are created by individual students, before the course begins? Which was weird.

This week have been more than chaotic. Right of the bat I noticed the sheer lack of insight that the creator of this concept had in the project. It was broken in so many places that it was hard to keep track of them all. Much of that was because of the complete nonexistence of any paperwork created for this project. Nothing was defined on paper.

My main efforts this week have been on trying to fix as much as possible before going into full production. This is almost impossible when you have a project leader who is completely blind to the things that are broken and what parts are missing. The game itself was functional but far from fun and dynamic in its game-play. On top of this we had a back story that didn't match the mechanics of the game. It felt like the story was something over-coated after the game mechanics were designed.

Eventually I felt like nothing that I was saying got stuck and mistakes were repeated. At this point I let the design part go as it was functional in the sense that the players comes to their designated goal. This unfortunately only highlighted another issue, that nothing was clearly defined and large parts of the game were missing from the documents. With this and the fact that the cards were being heavily tested the risk for larger changes were still in play and that prevented me from doing any real graphical work. I did however with one of my colleagues start of to define the games visual aspects. This went fairly smooth, though it is hard to work in a group that don't have any real opinions about varying subjects, except for our project leader but those opinions are considered with great care. I am right now at a position where the risk that any work I do might be wasted. Though I guess that is better than rolling my thumb waiting for better days.