Capstone Workshop - Mike Vautour

1.       The game we chose to look at is called Mount & Blade: Warband, and it was released in 2010. It addressed its intended audience well. The game didn’t look great from what I’ve seen, but the different mechanics and gameplay that it introduced were fantastic and innovative.

2.       The intended audience is rts (real time strategy) players, and people who like medieval settings. Also people who are a fan of sandbox games. This worked well for its intended audience. It really set itself apart from other games in the sense that you have to fully control the combat (which is what really interested me). You also have full control of what you want to do in the universe. You can put yourself in power; you can follow someone in power. Honestly there are no limits to what you can do.  There are also 300 vs 300 people battles. Not many games can handle that amount of networking, and art while still having a functional game. The concept seems to be historically accurate, and it seems to be concise throughout the entire thing, and they also added a lot of accurate representations of how combat works while keeping the mechanic simple for a player to use. If the art was better I would say that they would innovate the way multiplayer games are going now. However the art in the game wasn’t that impressive; especially for when it released. It was still an impressive feat to have 300 v. 300 battles.

So I’m not going to say that our idea is the most creative or unique idea on the market right now. Currently we have a lot of different games that our core gameplay is competing with, and our idea is heavily influenced by the James Bond movies and the portal games. As an artist I would like to come up with an art style where I can make as little assets as possible to achieve something great. If I create four cube based assets, but make it so each side of the cube functions like its own asset I can lower my workload to create some really cool unique assets. If each side of the cube essentially became its own asset that gives me 6 assets per cube, and 24 assets for the four cubes I create. That would also help my teammates with the designing of levels, and I believe that would show my versatility as an artist. As far as the actual concept, well an underground base or lab. What can I do as an artist to have that environment stand out and seem innovative? I really need to do more research to find out what all of the tropes in popular culture are. If we were to make it to next semester I believe I can make some different assets to almost tell a story, or convey a message. Sometimes making art with a specific message can be a negative thing, and it may detract from my art as a whole but I like the idea of satire and social commentary in a game. For example if we go with the idea of test subjects we can have different test subject rooms, and we could make different test subjects based on what is popular in the media or the news right now. Like make a girl with a horse head and have her tongue stick out to make fun of Miley Cyrus. I really want to work on something that I’m going to have fun with. That’s always been the case with my artwork. I want to find a way to be innovative, but also at the same time I would like to have fun being the innovator. There is a lot riding on the art style and how it fits into our game and how it looks, so it would be a shame if I were the one to mess that up. As far as actually standing out in the genre it might be hard to get some spotlight on a racing game that features characters that are running. We should look at classic sonic the hedgehog games, and how they pulled off characters racing without vehicles. I feel like the fact that it is a racer without vehicles already makes our game stand out. Not many games would take a huge risk like that. There are a many challenges with getting a character to feel right along with giving the player the satisfaction as a racing game does. For example if you drive a car you expect to go a certain speed. As a human you are expected to go a certain speed, but in a game that speed would be too slow. So finding the right fun balance between these will definitely help us stand out in the long run. With the lab we just need to make it an interesting art style, and we need to find things to differentiate what has already been done in these setting before.