Mike Vautour

Challenging again tomorrow morning. Lets hope this goes well this time. Not that it went terrible last time. I expected it to go worse to be honest. I don't really know what i'm supposed to be writing in these posts. Oh well back to work...

Mike Vautour - Week 2

Testing was surprisingly fun, and we got good feedback. Like, REALLY GOOD FEEDBACK. However i still feel like our game isn't going to stand out enough. There are too many comparisons to other games (which i expected), and that scares me. I feel like we need to switch something up.

Matthew Jordan - The tic tac wars

   
     
             Going into the third week of the capstone project we were finally able to get our prototype into QA testing and it went a lot better then I could imagine. Everyone who played the game was having fun with the mechanics that were in the game and said how they wanted to play some more. Watching the testers play helped us determine where we wanted the game to go. Most of players spent their playtime just trying to kill one another in various different ways like trapping someone behind the walls and pelting them with bullets. The idea of building and destroying walls was received well but most people wanted them to be tweaked. At the end of the QA session we had a lot of great suggestions and recommendations about what people  wanted to see in our game.

       Of course I enjoyed finding out so many people liked our prototype, but what I found more interesting was the context the players decided to give to the prototype when they did not receive one. The first group of testers started saying it was a war between tic tacs who decided to start shooting each other with giant sugar cubes. Next came the great snow ball war where everyone was saying they were throwing around deadly snowballs. Hearing these wacky scenarios and seeing the testers having fun comes as sort of a relief to me because over the last few weeks me and my team have been told that our context needed to be more realistic or else it would effect how fun the game was. When first creating one of our capstone games I had envisioned this sort of world that was similar to the world in Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Cool World. In both of these worlds there is a clear distinction between how cartoons work and how real life works and they are still able to co-exist. A anvil to the head in this type of world is no big deal because of things like toon physics and hammer space. Yet after hearing the advice of our fellow peers we decided to go with a more realistic approach. Now I don't mind doing a more realistic context, in fact it's been fun doing the research about Prohibition and what weapons were commonly used in the 1920's. Games grounded mostly in reality are not bad some of my favorite games are based in reality. I just believe that a game that is considered "weird" can still be fun even when the premise is far away from reality.

Even though both games have both changed from their original designs I am still excited to work on both of them for the rest of the semester.
 
 
     

Can't wait. Mike Week one.

I'm feeling excited as the second class is upon us. We really seem to be meshing well as a team. So far in my production experience i've never had a group of people i've brainstormed this well with. There are always roadblocks. People sized roadblocks. So far so good, and i'm really excited to choose and present a game idea. I think we can make it pretty far. I'm hoping to be able to make some art soon (outside of brainstorming)

Mike signing off

Jason: Week One- I'm sure you're wondering why I gathered you all here today...

Well, looks like we started off on the right foot. 19 ideas were pitched, and two were voted on and selected. Tomorrow we pitch the ideas to our two faculty advisers and see which one they like best.

Our creative process in creating those 19 ideas was very simple. We wrote down a list of mechanics we really liked, and combined them with settings or art styles we thought fit, and threw in some filler to describe a basic vision of the game. People ended up tossing ideas out left and right. It worked really well for us, and we voted them down to the two we will be presenting tomorrow. They're hush hush for now, but we can't wait to update our readers and fans on our ideas and final decision.

The Hush Puppy Team

Matthew Jordan-Week one

Week One

            Week one of senior year has almost passed and our capstone project is underway. I was worried
after a the first class that we would not be able to come up with any ideas that we one hundred percent agreed on. Well after a few three hour meets and 19 game ideas later I could not be more wrong. As I just stated since the first capstone class me and the rest of my team have come up 19 game ideas that we all saw promise in. But, even though we enjoyed all the idea we came up with we know we wouldn't be able to make them all this year. Like the old saying "You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette" so we went a head and broke 17 our or eggs in order to create a delicious omelette, and after eating our omelettes we had two ideas left. Both ideas I feel very strong about, I believe that the two ideas we have have full potential to become very fun and interesting games.