Goal

So I had to come up with a concept goal marker for the level. I had to make a 3D model of it, and I have a couple of ideas.

Here is what I came up with:

The first one is suppose to be a flag. The second one is suppose to be a star.

I'm not sure if either one of these will work, but if not I can always come up with other things.

Concept HUD & Level Desing

 So I haven't been doing a good job at posting stuff on my blog, I'll try to do a better job at that.

For this spring, I was suppose to work on a concept HUD and a level. Here is what I've come up with:

This is the basic HUD. We are going to have a code window, a side bar, and a start button.

The window in the top left corner is suppose to have the "code" that corresponds with whatever the player has his or her cursor over.

The side bar has the items that the player can use in order to reach the goal of the level.

And the green button at the bottom is what sets everything into motion and lets the player see the result of what he did to try and solve the problem.

This is the HUD along with some simple level design.

I have a few more ideas, I will post those when I get a little more time. Thanks for reading.

Game Feedback

So I presented my new game idea today, and you can see the very short (3 slides total) power point presentation here.

I have to say that I'm not really good at speaking in front of large groups of people, so I kind of rushed the presentation. I could've done better and taken my time to explain more stuff about my game since some of the Master students had questions about the game afterwards.

I got some really good feed back from the Master students which I will write right here.

The one thing that I remember really well was that one of the students actually told me to change the game play for the game I have in mind. He said that if I really want to get the player to understand the immigrants in the game, that I shouldn't have them play as a soldier but rather as an immigrant. This would allow me to convey to the player the situations that immigrants have to go through to get to this country.

Next, I need to change the genre of the game. I shouldn't have a FPS, but more like an "adventure" type game where the player has to run away from the border patrol or whoever is after him. I don't really know the name of the Master student that said this, but he said that violence isn't really the way that I want to get this idea across in a topic that is very controversial on either side of the issue. He told me to play a certain game to get the idea of what he was talking about, but I couldn't catch the name of it. I'll ask him if I see him again.

They also told me that I need to think more about the game if I do decide to stick with the FPS genre and what would the difference be between the soldier killing everyone vs killing on the bad people. This aspect of the game might make or break the game, so it's very important to get it right.

I got a lot more feedback from some of the other students in the class, but I can't quite remember everything that they said.

Anyways, thats all.

New Game Idea

So now that I've gotten to think in depth about my old game idea, I'm not so sure that I actually like it that much. I know what I want to do with it, but I just don't know if I can put it into word that express what I want correctly. So I've decided to go with a much simpler idea, but it still ties into what I had in mind earlier. Here is what I want to do:

I've been thinking about making a 3D first person shooter (FPS) that is similar to Call of Duty, Metal of Honor, or any of those FPS that have come out recently but with a twist. Instead of making it with a soldier that is in the middle of a war, I want to make him someone that is stationed at the border between Mexico and the USA. His objective is to protect the border and to catch any undocumented immigrants that are trying to cross over.

The soldier is really good at his job, and never really stopped to think about the lives of the people that he arrested while trying to cross the border. One day, he catches some Coyotes trying to smuggle in people but he is also part of a drug cartel. The soldier finds this group of people and tries to arrest them, but they open fire on him. The soldier now has to kill everyone in the group because he doesn't know who is actually hostile and who isn't.

Once the soldier has survived this near death experience, he finds that among the casualties there was innocent people that weren't a threat at all. He feels really bad about this ordeal, but deep down knows that he had to do it to protect himself.

Is from this point on that he comes up with an idea, what if he tries to only find and arrest the bad people and lets the innocent people go.

This is just an idea now, but I think that it might be better than the Angry Birds idea that I had a while back. I will present this idea tonight, and I'll see what other people think about it.