Week 15 Post Crimbo

This week was the first week back after Christmas and the start of an exciting new project. Christmas was actually a busy time for me; juggling family events, bar work, and the usual catching up with old friends it was far from a relaxing break.  So I was more than ready to come back to Leicester and get stuck into some game art again.

So let me tell you a bit about the new project that we have been given. It’s called the Container city project. It’s a group environment project written for 4 people (but we have actually ended up with 5 members as the numbers for the year don’t quite work out)   

I chose to work with Max and Joe again after we had such a great time working together during the film room project. Also in my group are Josh Swarbrick and Jon Carney.

We got stuck in straight away with this project and grabbed a spare room with a whiteboard for idea generation.

(pic of whiteboards)

There were so many potential ideas we had floating around so we started by writing down any possible theme or location for the level and ended up with about 30 different possibilities.

To narrow those down and keep the process somewhat democratic we used a poll and all voted for our top 5 favorites, then took the top 5 ideas with the most votes.

We then used the whiteboard again to expand on those 5 ideas, writing down all the pros and cons and going more in depth about the different aspects of each possibility.

We were taking idea generation really seriously for this project, and felt like we were on a role, critically assessing each potential direction for the project rather than jumping in head first. I really felt like we had moved on a lot from when we were planning the film room project at the beginning of the year.  

I remember being told many times “your first idea is rarely your best” however in the end we decided on an idea what wasn't even on the original list of 30 yet somehow managed to sneak past our extensive idea generating process.

We have decided to make our container city level a dystopian Asian city, obviously built out of containers as is specified in the brief. We will be taking major inspiration from Kowloon walled city.

(pic of Kowloon)

I think that because we spend so long deliberating over which idea was the best, we were getting a little bit tired of all of them. Personally I was rooting for an idea that got dubbed “spooky science”, basically an abandoned research station in a remote location made from containers, with a slight horror vibe. I feel that pop up research stations lend themselves well to potentially made out of containers.

However this Kowloon walled city idea was suggest near the end of the deliberation process, it seemed fresh, unlike all the other ideas that we were discussing, and felt like a new surge of creativity and inspiration that we could all get on board.

At the end of the day all of our ideas had potential, it just depends how much work we put into them, and I think that as we are all pretty excited about the Kowloon idea, we will be able to put some decent work into it.