BA2b - Week 1 Summary

This week we started a new term, and with that a new brief. Our next task is Collaboration Game production, where we have to get into teams of five and make a game that works with the theme 'Escape'. The game has to be based on gameplay, aesthetics and 'feels' and not based on narrative, so the mechanics are more important and we should limit any story based areas.

We decided that we wanted to make an escape the museum game, where you have 4 rooms that have 4 mini-games that you have to complete in order to get the keys/etc to the main door to escape. It will be a horror game based around the graphics of games like classic Doom and Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor with its 2.5D pixel aesthetics. What I want to try out in this game jam is the same aesthetic of Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor where they have pixels on a billboard so that it turns and seems 3D when its actually just a sprite. This is something that I really liked about the game and wanted to incorporate it into my next project,

I wanted to focus mainly on the 2D aspects of the game, and also help with any coding needed. As we needed to prove we could make this game in the given time, we decided to firstly focus on one of the rooms, the human anatomy exhibit. So far I have made a number of sprites for this room.

These are the images I used to help me with some of the pixel sprites:

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I wanted to make them small and detailed, similarly to much of the Doom sprite art. The skull, spaceship, dinosaur footprint and anubis head are icons for the UI on the left of the screen displaying what rooms you've completed. The key, keycard, number and finger are the 'keys' for opening the locks on the large door. 

I was trying to keep the same resolution as the pixel art from the original Doom, which is very low so the pixels are very small and yet very detailed.

Also below is an early screenshot of the game with my UI pixels on the left side. 

We were also told to make a trello board to keep it all organised.

We were also told that next week we are doing a collaboration project with Fine Art to make a video, and also to do one of the interchange workshops. I chose to do the Electromagnetic Sound Worlds full day workshop.