The Vertical Slice: Weekly Log #1

Thursday 24th February

As a team in class we quickly settled upon wanting to have a very artstyle-focused cute looking game. We came to this conclusion because when discussing our strengths and weaknesses, we really wanted to put a focus on the strong 3D art skills in our group from myself and Will, and wanted to work within a artstyle/game that we both knew we could make look the absolute best we could do. One of the first things I brought up with my team was one of my recent projects I did for this module, "The Set Up" brief, because I was really happy with how it looked and wanted to go for a similar style in our own game. I thought this would be good because since we wanted a cute game it would fit the artstyle but also because I knew I would be able to excell at this, which would free up a lot more of my time down the line to experiment with other areas and do anything that is needed - as opposed to, let's say, having to do a horror game/style and having to spend extra time figuring out how/what to do because I'm not used to that.

That being said, I would have been happy to go out of my comfort zone and do absolutely anything that was needed, but luckily my team already really liked my style and art and was happy to let me direct that for our game.

This week was mainly just the very initial set up as like any other brief; gathering research, discussing as a team in calls and in class, and setting up our group chat & Trello board:

As you can read above, we did have a few ideas for different gameplay & story within our game while keeping the cute artstyle mentioned before. Initially we all really loved the idea of having our very cute and small frog character in a scary and hard Dark Souls style game with intense mechanics and fighting, but we came to the conclusion that it would simply be too challenging with our current skillset and time.

Another thing we realised is that our team is VERY art heavy, which I think is also a strength for us, but can make things hard if we become too ambitious with more technical aspects of our game.

Next week I will start actually concepting things from all of our discussions!