Building Alliances: Initial Ideas

Initial Ideas: Genres

As a group we have discussed the game genre of the project we will work on. Discussing a variety of ideas, we eventually decided upon the idea of a "Tower Defence" game based around the Microplastics brief. I believe that such an idea is unique and provides interesting design challenges, with design aspect mainly focused around buildings and a wider variety of environments as opposed to characters, props or monsters. Though I have not personally created as many Environment designs as I have characters or monsters, I feel very confident working towards the production of a game of this nature, and feel that we have a strong concept with focused themes we can work towards. 

Initial ideas posed a game concept in which the player defends body structures such as organs and tissues from attacking Microplastics. These Microplastics would serve as the primary antagonists of the game, with the player placing defences to fend off waves of attack. We then each added elements of our own personal inspiration to the idea: our group Director, Sebastian, has played a lot of Tower Defence games and recorded a video explaining the gameplay of one such game, Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance (Ironhide Game Studio 2024). This demonstration helped me to understand more about the genre and assisted in my initial idea generation. 

Initial Ideas: Moodboards

With a game concept decided upon I created several moodboards exploring different ideas and inspirations for visual aesthetics, game styles and level designs. In this I tried to look at a variety of different styles, annotating each moodboard with points to explain why I believed they were good inspirations for our project and how they may be utilised.








Initial Ideas: Sketches

I also created several sketches based around initial ideas that my group spoke about. These helped me to visualise how the development of the game may look and demonstrated the broad concept of our project. Being fairly rudimentary in form they do not bear any annotation. In future work I will annotate design elements before sharing them to the group, as this will help ensure that everyone in the group is on a similar level of understanding regarding the design principles and ideas I have implemented or added to the assets I have made. 





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