FMP - Week 1 - Getting started

Well, here we go again! After a lovely break it is time to get started on my fifth and last module: the final major project (FMP). Ever since I started this course I have actually already been thinking about what I want to do for my FMP. I figured out that there are two things I want to utilize this module for:

1. I want to be able to pitch my final artefact to investors at the end of the module, to try and raise funding for continued development after the master's.

2. I want to make dragons. Yup, dragons. I want to model them and bring them alive through animations and VFX. I don't really care what type of game I'll make for this module, as long as there are enough dragons.

Although it was great to find a sense of clarity in terms of what my goal is for this module, you still have to make a game as well. And due to goal number 1, this needs to be a game that will be both fun and achievable to produce. After some reflection I figured out that I don't have the full skillset to be a succesfull solo developer at this moment in time. I'm pretty good at art, animation and VFX, and programming, but I find myself lacking at game design and level design. Basically, I can make a game look good but I'm bad at putting the fun factor in there. The fun factor is however a very critical component in making something market ready. This realization sparked a conversation with fellow student Rob Charlish, who is extremely good at game design and putting the fun in a game, but who doesn't really like the artsy side much. Turns out, Rob has the same goal for this module and also wants to pitch at the end. We therefore decided to join forces! Rob and I have already worked together on the 730 module and this was a great success. Our skills really complement each other and I think our personalities do too, which helps.

Starting up

To get started, Rob and I had a quick meeting to discuss both what each of us wants to get out of this project and to have a quick brainstorm about ideas we wanted to explore. There were three main ideas that we liked:

• A Grand Theft Auto style game but make it medieval

• An isometric battle strategy game based around the Greek story of the titanomachy

• A dragon racing game

After some back and forth we settled on a dragon racing game as starting concept that we would want to start fleshing out. Since we want to make something that is financially viable, we decided to first do a market analysis before diving into what feature brainstorms. I took it upon myself to scour through Steam to find potential competitors or otherwise relevant games (i.e. games with similar mechanics but different target audiences). The outcome I noted down on a FigJam board (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Quick market scan outcomes. The medieval GTA and the Titanomachy idea were tossed so only the dragon racing game section is properly filled out.

I learned a couple of things from this market scan:

1. Even if it doesn't involve cars, racing games can still attract large audiences

2. horse racing games that basically do the same but with horses are typically very well received, and if they are not the negative reviews are focused almost exclusively on bad microtransaction systems, or on the fact that it's too targeted at girls only.

3. There are some dragon games where you fly around as a dragon and destroy things. Most of these were indie games that all seemed to use the same asset packs for the dragons and didn't appear finished. People were lured in by the premise of playing as a dragon but were disappointed by the quality of these games or lack of content. Seems that the concept resonates though, execution of these indie titles simply seemed below par.

4. I couldn't find a game that did it already for PC. I found two actual dragon racing games, one was for VR specifically but people got very motion sick. They liked the mechanics though, but content was also too limited to really gain traction. The other one for PC was never released but has stayed in TBA for over 2 years now. Project seems dead.

It seems like there is an opening in the market that hasn't really been addressed in terms of dragon racing games. That's a good sign! Therefore we decided to continue looking into this concept.

Rob refined my market scan and did a feature breakdown and revenue estimation for the most relatable games. I build upon his work and did a pluses and deltas analysis for each of these games, based on their reviews on steam.

Ideation

Having found that there is a sizeable market we can potentially address, we started the ideation progress. I made a section in FigJam to put my initial ideas down in terms of features we could potentially include. I know that we will definitely not be able to put all in, but since it's the ideation phase I just wanted to get all my ideas jotted down somewhere.

Figure 2: FigJam section with feature ideas.

Since there is a whole visual aspect to a game as well, I also started a quick moodboard with some ideas. The moodboard might still change completely, but putting together images helps me in fleshing out the concept. I also got started on some sketches for dragon ideas.

Figure 3: Moodboard and sketches

Research (WIP)

I also did some research this week into racing games, specifically any noticeable academic findings we might be able to utilize. I came across a bunch of papers using evolutionary algorithms or other forms of AI to continuously match the skills level of the player (Cardamone et al., 2011; Lucas 2007). This way all players can stay challenges since you adapt the tracks or the bot opponents to the capabilities of the player. It seems that there are two parts of a racing game that can be tweaked this way:

1. the track

2. the opponents

It would be interesting to see if we can explore any of these options in our artefact.

I also did some non academic research into dragon 3D models, specifically how to rig and animate them and if there are any resources I might use. Luckily there was a humble bundle with tiny dragons for sale a while ago which I bought so this was a good place to start.

WIP

Logistics

Since it's week 1, there are of course also some logistics that still needed to be taken care of in terms of teamwork. Therefore I:

• Set up a shared Google Drive

• Created the shared FigJam board

• Arranged my next meeting with Rob

• Prepared an agenda for my next meeting with Rob so we can make notes

• Looked into what version of Blender to use

• Downloaded the version of Unity we decided to use and cloned the Git repo we set up

List of References

Cardamone, L., Loiacono, D., & Lanzi, P. L. (2011). Interactive evolution for the procedural generation of tracks in a high-end racing game. Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, 11. https://doi.org/10.1145/2001576.2001631

Lucas, S. (2007). Towards automatic personalised content creation for racing games. In J. Togelius, R. de Nardi, & S. M. Lucas (Eds.), IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games. https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2007.368106