Extended Practice Weekly Evaluation: Week 4

9th to the 15th February 2015
Again I feel a little bit behind last week and therefore this week I had a fair chunk of work to catch up on, but most of it was doing research into the locations that I wanted to focus on, and Egypt to ensure that I had a lot of facts about it before designing my level. I firstly wanted to do research into existing media that covered either Egypt or was a game or film with similar themes and this lead me onto watching a fair few and also watching documentaries about Egypt and the pyramids to be able to understand them further.

Once all of the location research was finished and we both had a nice level of understanding on our environments we moved onto creating the actual back story for the game. This came very easy to us and we generated a lot of ideas surrounding the wonders of the world and ensured that the story was simple to follow but also included characters with humour and a twist in the story. We then each came up with an story idea about what happens in our level to get a quick idea into how it is going to run.

We were then also able to come up with ideas about who the hero of the story is going to be able the enemy featured in it as we wanted to go with the typical story that most games from the 90s era used. We came to the conclusion that we wanted to use animals as I had previously done this in a project last year and it was really fun to bring them to life and work out how they would move around a level. We finally decided on a koala bear for the main character and an otter for the enemy as these are unusual animals to appear in a game and we couldn't find one that had been done before.

We then took the time to do a bit of research into the movement and interactions of the animals, myself looking at the main character, and Sophie looking at the enemy. This was fun as it gave us that opportunity to look at how they would stand if they were going to stand on two legs and how they would interact with other characters. This also brought to life issues that we may come across like the fact that koala's sleep for 20 hours a day, and gave us a challenge of finding a way around this problem.

Overall this week was very successful and we where able to accomplish a lot, despite still being a bit behind we were on target to get everything done for our Research and Development presentation which would also mark the deadline for this half of the project as well.