The Iceman Cometh

After a small hiatus with work on other projects, I'm pleased to announce that "People of the Dawn" (working title) is back in preproduction. After successfully building a character from scratch, animating and importing him into the Torque game environment, the serious work of developing the actual game play and visual style has begun.





This all begins of course with the game design document, which outlines the game concept, key features and the game experience. Given my background, this starts with a mixture of "in game" screen drawings with hand written notes on basic game mechanics. The approach is more visual and I find more comfortable rather than pages of descriptive words. It allows me to imagine the game play as a whole and how that might feel.





From there I was able to work out a basic first pass flow for the GUI structure and begin to generalize on player interactions and choices. This gives me a skeleton to work out from so that I can focus on each screen in detail knowing how it relates to areas around it. As I doodle, I start thinking about how these screens might be laid out and even elements of the style.





The target audience will in many respects drive the style but of course at the end of the day, it will have to be something that I'm comfortable with too. After working on the notes for the game I began to envision my Player as someone between 9 and 14 years old. Perhaps older or younger which will be a bonus. So what I'm looking to develop is something that doesn't look too cute or too realistic - something stylized but not necessarily cartoony.

Obviously, I have some work ahead of me :)

Until next time.