Totemic

Last week the class got to divide itself into new groups for a new course to start making games for the Gotland Game Conference (GGC). Half of my old team is the same with the addition of one artist, one designer/artist and one coder. The theme of the GGC is unconventional controls and after completing "Terminal" we wanted to focus on keeping it simple and polishing it to perfection.

We started a few weeks before starting the course with brainstorming what controls to use and finally decided that we wanted to have the player control two characters simultaneously, one with a joystick and one with a trackball. One of our aesthetic goals is "chaos", we want there to be a lot for the players to keep track of and we want them to engage in friendly competition, shouting and pushing each other while having fun. That was one reason that we decided to create the game for four players, having eight characters on the screen at the same time will help us reach that goal.

When the course started we were still brainstorming on where the game would be set and who the characters would be, the original idea was of little geniuses controlling their homemade robots but in the end we chose to go with a shamanistic/tribal theme set in a tropical environment. The characters would be one shaman and one spiritual creature that they had summoned to protect them from the other shamans' creatures and to stop the other shamans.The shamans were during the concept phase turned into forest spirits wearing tribal inspired masks and costumes and the summoned creatures were to be whirlwind-like, wearing the same mask and colour as their shaman.

The team soon decided for the game to be a "King of the hill" kind of game, placing a totem pole in the centre that each player would need to control for a total amount of 30 seconds to win. To make the game more interesting, as another of our aesthetic goals is "anyone's game", we decided to take inspiration from the negative feedback loop of "Mario cart" to make it more difficult for the player holding the totem and easier for the other players to take it over. We felt that this would make the players use both characters more and keep moving around instead of just going straight for the middle, this is going to need a lot of balancing though.

Along with the other artist, I started working on finding inspirational images, creating Moodboards and making Concept Art as well as starting to list all artefacts that would need to be created in a Scrum Backlog. Together with the Lead Designer, Oskar, I put together a PowerPoint presentation and went up in front of the class and a, larger than usual, jury of teachers and teacher's assistants to pitch our idea. We did not get any really negative feedback and most of the things that were brought up were things that we had already thought about. The biggest discussion was wether it would be too difficult for the player to control the two characters at once, in case it doesn't work we have several backup plans, for instance making it co-op instead. We got some valuable feedback and managed to get a green light for the production of our game called "Totemic".

I will finish what turned out to be an essay of the first week at the "Theme Park"-course with some Concept Art I created.