A brief talk

A couple of days ago I had my first talk with the mentor that was assigned to me: Jeff Cook. Jeff knows his point-and-click games inside out. Luckily for me that means I'll be getting spot-on help and advice. So it's a good thing that I requested him specifically. We started off by me showing the mediaproduction demo that I had made. He let me know that he thought the demo succeeded in creating a film noir world. He found the visuals and sound creating a nice immersive feeling.

I told him that my love for point-and-click games mainly comes from the LucasArts games (I'll blog about this subject later) and that I noticed that the main characters in these games are always visible on the screen and the player can click wherever they want the character to go. My demo doesn't have this. Instead the player is looking through the eyes of the main character. I did this mainly for technical reasons because it would require advanced programming skills which I don't really have. Would this be okay, I asked him. He told me that it was fine and that I could play around with this. When interacting with another person, make him look at the camera, thus breaking the fourth wall. This way you let the player know he/she embodies the main character at that time. This is a great idea that I'll be sure to play around with.

I actually liked the look of the earlier LucasArts games so much, that I wanted my entire game to also look pixelated with big floating black-bordered dialogue text. Jeff explained that the visuals would really suffer from this. To make the entire game in this style would not be a good idea but he did add that it would be fun if for example at one time the main character drinks too much and in this drunk state the entire screen would change into a pixelated LucasArts style. And the main character even reacting to this situation. Again a great idea..

What's in that grog stuff, anyway? So I also told Jeff I'd have to see how far I can get in creating a complete game. My priorities actually lie more with creating a quality game instead of making a full-length game that's predictable and just uninteresting. That's why making shorter episodes and having it end with a cliffhanger would also be okay with me. Quality before quantity. We'll see how that goes. We made a couple of more agreements, for example the software that I would make the game in. Even though I made the demo in Adobe Flash, I still want to do an experiment to figure out which software is the most suitable for the job. I'll also do another experiment to figure out the art style of the game. I personally don't think the art style in my recent demo is a real headturner. So I'd like to change that into something more interesting. I'll keep you up to date.