Hello everyone!
It has been a while since I posted but that is because I've been busy at work this summer working on the game Five-Finger Gunslinger I discussed in my previous posts. If you want to check out the game, you can grab it on Steam here.
Anyway, what have I been up to recently you ask? Well, currently I'm starting into my senior year of college and beginning the first stages of concepting my capstone project! I've got a super talented team (including a couple folks from Five-Finger) and can't wait to see the awesome work they all produce!
Normally, concepting is one of the first steps a team tackles at the start of the school year but our team wanted to get a head start over the summer. About a month and a half ago, my team all hopped into a discord call and I pitched a bunch of ideas at them. We then discussed the ideas, how we could possibly combine them, and which ones were out of the scope of our limited production time.
I came into the meeting with a favorite already in mind. The concept was for an RPG based around dreams: basically, the player would be switching between a graphic adventure game, in the waking world, while their dreams would play like a rogue-like where death meant waking up again. I wanted to draw inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft's Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and give the whole thing a touch of Cosmic Horror.
Well when the meeting came, I pitched my list of ideas leaving the dream RPG as the last option. When I finished my pitch, my precious idea quickly became the subject of a lot of critiques. My teammates pointed out a lot of aspects of the concept I had been blind to. Chief of these issues was that constructing both a graphic adventure game and rogue-like would be extremely out of scope. We only have a semester to create a pitch (that will allow us to move on to the fall) and if we end with two half-baked systems there is no way we will ever get green-lit to start full production.
While at first I was disappointed, another of my ideas was chosen I was not expecting: an idea for a rogue-like Pokémon inspired game based around the famous Nuzlock challenge. One of my teammates pointed out how this could be combined with a Cyberpunk Victorian setting I had concepted a year ago and soon a whole new picture a begun to appear.
If anything, I think the point I wish to make by this post is to show why we go through concepting in the first place. If it had been only up to me, we would have been starting production on a game that ultimately was not viable in the timeframe we are working in. It was only with the critical eye of my teammates that we are moving forward with this new concept that I am now way more excited about that my dream RPG (although I still want to make it at some point to).
We are currently still in very early development but I'll be posting more info here as production continues on this new project.
Thanks ya'll!