studio-gameOn

Wow, what a week! I have been so impressed  with the team’s professionalism and how they have stepped up to the tasks at hand. Friday became affectionately known as Judgment Day - the day we all focused our talents toward, the day to impress the Board. Along with the last minute printing of the concept art and the final preparation, we were good to go. We delivered our two main concepts, knowing full well we would be saying goodbye to one of them.

A general overview given by the board is listed below…

B GRADE (Concept 1)

Benefits:
Target Audience – suit Kids & Mums
Simple – Play & Go
Open to Crowd Input
Liked the Parody of Movie Ideas
Open to Variety

Risks:
Context Animation
-2D in a Box Plug In for Physics
-However to animate Background for 3 levels is achievable.

GOLEM (Concept 2)
Hard Core Target Market
Complexity of Interface
Animation Assets / Actions / PowerUps would be time consuming.
Would suit  Game Developers

The team had produced two really strong game ideas though each had their own target market and benefits sought. The artists were praised by the board for the quality and amount of concept art. After a short deliberation and consultation with the team. B GRADE got the green light.

At the end of the day there was a sense of accomplishment with alot of smiling de-stressed faces. It was a great way to end the week and I couldn’t think of a better team to spend it with.

Well finally I have come up for air. During the past couple of days I have been doing a lot of the background preparation and planning behind Studio GameOn, such as more research into Management Styles (Scrum), Occupational Health & Safety, working on the Gantt Chart and creating the entries on what will be a very busy time as well as a lot of forward-planning. While some of you may think this is boring, I love to plan and be organised so that I can offer the team clear goals with the maximum allowable time to achieve it. Even though it has only been a couple of days, you can already see the team unifying together as now we have two really strong concepts.  Thanks to the entries on the forum, it has laid the foundations to what is going to be something truly amazing. I must admit I am very happy with our progress so far and how the team has responded. The buzz in the studio at the moment is contagious.

progress continues… today we planned on how to expose our work to the world at large.

We have quite a few activities planned to publicise Studio GameOn. We have School visits, posters, and fliers.

If all goes according to plan you may even see on TV and in the paper, hear about us on Radio and read about us on your favorite game-related websites.

Hopefully all does go well, because the hard-working studio team deserves recognition and it would be great to have future studios

josh m

I’d forgive you if you thought I was at least a little nervous.

6 weeks- it sounds like a reasonably long time, but it’s only 30 working days. Only a paltry 720 hours. Sure, between the 16 of us, it expands to a slightly more re-assuring 11520, but that’s working under the assumption that everyone was full-time, and we had no sickness through out the project.

To make a fully featured game in that span is more then a little intimidating, but to tell the truth, after our first day, I’m none to worried. We have an elite, crack squad of passionate young developers, artists and designers who are more then ready to go charging into this project and attack it ferocious with tooth and claw.

So what is my job among this I hear you ask? In a nutshell, I’m responsible for anything game related- ensuring all the individual teams are on the same page, ensuring that all the elements of the game remain pure to the core concept, and ensuring that all elements of the game come together to form a cohesive whole.

The first day was promising, and now that the housekeeping has been taken care of we’re in a good position for a week of rock solid awesomeness.

Wish us luck,

~Rory

December 2008

So how does a game get made? Well first of all we start with our team - check them out - applicants were reviewed by our honoured industry board and well, thrown in at the deep end!

Then we will get them to bounce around ideas and PLAN - you can help here - if you have any ideas or characters or settings - or anything you might like to see in a game why not contribute over on the contributions page or via the studio box at the State Library of Queensland GAME ON Exhibition!