School project....getting ugly

So, as the final project in our game design class, we have to make a video game. So we also have to propose the concept. We turn in the proposal a week from next Friday and have about a month from now to finish the completed game. My teammates have dragged their feet the whole way; they don't seem to want to spend any extra time on the class like I do. But we that we should meet today and figure out what our game will be.

So, I go off and I come up with this fairly ambitious thing: a 2d side-view action-adventure with strong plot similarities to the first Die Hard movie; in this one, the terrorists take over a nuclear missile silo, plotting to launch the missile and start a war(or maybe some other similar bad thing), and as the chief security officer you try to stop them before it's too late. The main focus of the game is to make it a "simulation" of the attack, rather than a linearly-scripted game, so that it feels alive and dynamic - still cutscenes to add drama could also be added in by dressing up with costumes, taking photos and subtitling them. After coming up with this idea, I do about five pages of sketches and notes and start implementing some of the most challenging parts of the game: the pathfinding routine and world model. Although we're recommended Game Maker and have spent many lectures on learning to use it, I get annoyed at the scripting syntax after about an hour and turn to my default of Python, and it unsurprisingly turns out to be a much faster tool for me. Today I got some work on the actor model(sensing and reacting to events) started.

So then I talk to the other two guys during/after class. They both go "uhh, I didn't come up with anything." And they hold reservations on my idea too; on feasability, on how similar in theme it seems to so many games, and on how easily they can understand it since, as I'm envisioning it, it's not really a clone of anything in *particular*, but it uses some well-known gameplay elements in slightly unusual ways. They would feel far more comfortable with a clone, of course. The three of us don't actually have a meeting, because the guy that set it up runs off after class apparently forgetting our meeting, so I only got to talk to that one briefly. But I show the other one the progress I've already made and he just sits there like an emotionless lump. "If we go forward with this you're going to do most of the work," he warns. (this is in reference to my using Python)

I guess I will do most of the work because I don't think they'll come up with anything at all. As partners, they seem absolutely depressing at the moment. They have no sense of time constraints or enthusiasm for making anything. I think I can get them a little more hyped up once I have things moving around on the screen, but it looks like it'll be a long four weeks either way. They don't appear to have any skills to speak of(they certainly aren't advertising it), so I don't know what they can do if they do managed to get stoked about the whole thing.

An interesting side note: Myself and Nic(the guy I mentioned in a previous entry with the awesome physics engine) are, as far as we know, the only ones of a handful - like three or four groups of two/three in a class of 170 - trying to do a non-Game Maker project. We also coincidentally happened to structure both our games (in gameplay, not thematically) on the blueprint of old Dynamix titles. He's doing something like "David Wolf: Secret Agent" because it suits his engine. I'm doing something like "Project: Firestart" because...well, I dunno, but nobody's really touched that design yet, so far as I know. And it's a good one to work off of, and I'm twisting things around to add a little to it. So there :)