Meeting
Had a Skype meeting with Sean. Agenda: progress report, discussion, next steps, these goddamn kids these days, Fumie Abe, video games, slow emotionally crushing death in the cold black of space, etc., etc.
For some reason internet at my undisclosed location was malfunctioning: going to google.com would redirect you to yahoo.com. Google hangouts didn’t seem to like that, although Skype seemed to work. Don’t know what’s up with that, but it’s every device in the place, which indicates some problem at the ISP or the router to me. Some malicious Yahoo hack attack? Marissa Meyer getting revenge (for what?), one household at a time? Who knows!
Release
Not like we’re actually releasing it in the sense that anyone will ever see it, but this is the state of version 0.0.1. Observe the viewing globe:
(note: don’t insert images at the top of a WP post, or apparently you’ll be sorry)
We have a stage on the left, with five players (the various multi-colored squares at the left (from top to bottom Funkmouf, Gravelthroat, Leper Skinz, Bass Boy, Frank (colors based on their background colors in FMB media)), who are charged by ninjas (the yellow squares) distributed across five lanes. The ninjas currently have a chance of trying to attack with ninja stars, though they are sadly unable to follow through just yet.
Mechanics
Q. Does the concept of lanes make sense? As of now all enemies and players are locked to a certain lane, Plants vs. Zombies style. I suppose enemies in a band member’s lane could only attack that band member. The other options is to have enemies have unrestricted movement and arbitrary targeting. If we go with lanes, should we have a mechanic to reposition band members? Enemies that can move across a certain number of lanes?
A. Just go with lanes for now.
Sean worked on the story, which is on Google Drive, which I am unable to view because of this crazy internet clusterfuck that’s going on now. But we went over it a little bit and it’s sounding pretty good.
Q: Should we introduce strategy element? Like a resources management kind of thing, getting to the next gig, playing solo/smaller gigs to build up pimp buxx, etc.?
A: maybe? But we probably need to focus on one gameplay element at a time. Let’s plan to get the storm-the-stage thing working first, then see if we can introduce additional gameplay elements once we’re feeling pretty good about that.
OR if we have a really solid design, we could get to work on it. But for now we’ll work on the basic stage gameplay and see if we can get a better sense of things from research and experimentation.
Game progression
Maybe we could start out with the band separated, have to get them together? Then battles start with one player (FM), then find another player. This works as tutorial plus difficulty and complexity progression.
Maybe that’s the first 1/3 (or less?) of the game, then the rest is take-over-the-world kinda thing.
It could either be the band origin story (which Sean already has worked out), or they can start the game artificially separated (through trauma/nefarious schemes of Dick Dangerous?)
Then does the resource management thing get introduced immediately, with just one band member, or at a certain point as a surprise-we-do-this-too mechanic, ala ADR?
Plan
Rich: Get gameplay working good, forget all the other stuff. Get enemies attacking, then players attacking.
Sean: Work on story narrative, flesh it out, look at Flash.
Both: Read over flash game development article in depth, absorb it, accept it, embrace it, investigate its links.
Goddamn Kids
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSJyNiHDx94
Turn your volume down before clicking this link
Next meeting
Sunday 27 oct 2013 4:30 ET