Industry Practice- Powerpoint and Thumbnails

 Industry Practice- Powerpoint and Thumbnails

For this session, We settled on a game name: A Monster Problem. We also started creating our pitch PowerPoint. Below are the notes the director (Sam) took this session relating to what we had to do after we had a group discussion about it.

• Describe our roles
• PC platform
• Each person describes their own character/struggles + Concepts
• Synopsis for game
• Moodboards
• Genre - Casual Horror/Mystery/Psychological (Little Miss Fortune, Fran Bow)
• Mechanics

Everyone had to create a slide of their choice, as well as a slide about their character relating to our game. We also did the slides in lesson that required input from us all.

Now with these done, I moved onto my section. My first slide was were I looked into different games and the correlations between the games that do the best on Itch.io (where we plan to release the games).

This was my first slide - I looked into different games on Itch.io relating to our game's potential tags, and did research based off of that since it applies to us the most. Next I went through the target audience part:

Market Analysis - Audience:

Our target audience is those between the ages of 18-25 since they are most likely to understand the themes of our story more, but the game is suitable for anyone aged 14+.

As a visual novel, the context in which players are most likely to play the game is on a PC in their home. Due to being a short experience, the game can be completed within one sitting. This goes back to our target audience, since its runtime for one playthrough fits nicely with our target demographic, and if they were busy with a job or chores etc.

In terms of PEGI ratings, the most suitable for this game is PEGI 12. This is because it is the closest to the lowest age we are targeting (That being 14+). The game will have very mild bad language and depict mental health and some traumatic situations - but will still be suitable for the PEGI 12 rating.

Another few lesser factors that influenced who we targeted the game for were emotional intelligence and reading age, which means players around their 20s are most likely to understand the themes of the game.

Our game is in line with the target audience, with the art style straying far away from realism, and the main characters beginning the game as monsters. Our unique selling point is that our art style and the art in general transforms as the game carries on, turning into something that reflects a different mood completely by the end.

Here are the references I recorded for the work I have done.

Next, using the previous concept I made of my character and the moodboard, I began to draw a more detailed concept of my character.

I focused on expanding the original idea I had for my character from a few lessons ago, retaining their original colour palette, as well as make them more unnatural with the inverted colours.

Since we are including elements of horror, I briefly experimented with some elements of uncanniness, but this is something I will experiment with more later on since I want to get my base ideas down first.

I also began to design an initial thumbnail for the Jesters room when in their flashback/ memory sequences.

I used two point perspective for this, and wanted to keep the room looking mostly empty since I wanted it to look less lively. I am going to have a more in depth discussion with the Environment Lead (Damian) about these backdrops, but I am going to include it in the pitch as a proof of concept.

I also received some feedback from Faye (Research Lead) regarding my character design.

Faye brought up a lot of valid points for my character design and how well it will actually fit into the game. So far, everything has been thought about, so I took the suggestions of colour mockups into mind, but responded as such:

Everything mentioned here is basically what I did as I went along designing the character. My main concern was the fact that it might not fully stand out on a black or darker background, so I have inverted the line art to be white. Faye raised some excellent points and concerns about the design, but I want to see what other members of the team do - especially Damian when we get around to fully designing backgrounds - before I make any drastic change to my character and colour palette.

With this, I have completed the slide about my character so far. In the pitch, I plan to talk about some individual elements I haven't mentioned here, but since we have a time limit I will keep it brief when talking about that (hence why I didn't have large boxes of text). Also, since this is only the planning stage still, I want to keep some loose ends in case I need to change my character to be more in line with the overall game style.