Concepts
Every game starts from an idea which is eventually developed
to a high-concept, before going into a full-scale concept that, in detail,
explains the game’s plot, characters and amazing features within allowing the
game. When Shigeru Miyamoto started working on Legend Of Zelda the high concept
of this was for two players to create dungeons underground and explore, after
testing this game he changed it to a one player exploring dungeons gaining the
idea of letting player go above ground as well- thus creating Hyrule Field and
Lake Hylia.
In the end the concept of Zelda was a normal boy going by
name of Link (because he links people together) is thrown into conflict by an
evil force that threatens Hyrule, the Triforce and the Princess Zelda. Link must rescue the damsel in distresses by
collecting spirit energies across Hyrule to stop the evil wizard Ganon, from
seizing the power of the Triforce and bringing destruction to the world. After
25 years of working on this game and bringing out 17 different games (not
including HD remakes or spin-off titles), the whole concept of the Zelda titles
have been spilt into three timelines depending on how Link faces Ganon in
Ocarina of Time. Even now the director and producer of Zelda: Eiji Aonuma
states there’s three different concepts of the series in which the team have a
variety of ways to make the next sequel, compared to other games that can’t
continue because the storyline has come to an end.
Compared to Zelda franchise, Spyro the Dragon games went
through a whole different process and have ended up in a spot where the story
ends up in loop when all the games are played. The original concept behind
Spyro with Insomniac Games is that player controls a purple dragon that is able
to breathe fire and slightly fly. Spyro the dragon is then forced to rescue his
brethren or the dragon realms (in Insomniac games), by collecting gems, gears
or dragon eggs to defeat the evil sorcerer Gnasty Gnorc or a relative of his.
Along the way you met different characters like Hunter, St.Bird, Yeti and Sparx
your companion showed you your health. When Spyro was brought by Activision
they slightly changed the Spyro games by scrapping some of the characters and
in introducing ‘boring’ antagonists. In the end Activision came up with an idea
by making prequels of Spyro where the game goes before the first of the series
but yet slightly follows after Hero’s Tale. This is where the original concept
of Spyro was scrapped and a new one was created. Spyro became part of a
prophecy and was raised as a dragonfly with Sparx before having to endure a
relentless battle against the evil purple dragon Malefore. In the last three
games you had a health bar, Sparx was now something that only interacted during
cut scenes (same with hunter) and new characters were scripted as well as
Spyro’s features. In the end it made out Spyro and Cynder had a relationship
and died in order to protect the dragon realms, there it leads on to a new
generation of the purple dragon going back to the first game.
Another example of a different concept process would be for
games that are based on a movie, series or even a story, because half of the
concept has already been completed for games designers so all they have to do
is think of game play rather than the story. Naruto, Beyblade, Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles and some games of Kingdom Hearts are all examples of this.
With my game’s high-concept it began with wolves that
carries certain elements and are chained together, after that more characters
and storyline starting coming together where we have the main protagonist who’s
a peasant-girl with royal bloodlines and roaming around the streets of Japan
unaware of who she really is.
Research
Personal research will have to be conducted to give a
realisation of whether these concepts can be achievable depending on: time,
money, budgets, commitments, knowledge, licensing and whether you’re working on
this idea yourself, with friends or in a company- all must be considered to
make sure your production doesn’t flop and no one goes bankrupt. The other side
of research (this would most likely apply to businesses that have already
launched a game and plan to release a sequel, prequel or HD version) is to
discover what your idea has in common or doesn’t have in common with other games,
what competition you’ll be facing and maybe one the greatest elements to gain
knowledge on what the public wants or liked; you could also reflect upon what
games you’ve personally enjoyed and have they influenced the concept you’ve
created?
That’s why a lot of people release questionnaires for a specific
target audience, fan-base or even the general public to find out answers that
can help their future sales (primary research). Although this hasn’t got
anything to do with games the producer of the manga Naruto, openly confessed he
researched on a lot of Naruto fan-bases gaining secondary research and decided
to draw in a few ‘fan-service’ scenes where a hinted relationship between
Naruto and Sasuke appear. This proved a huge success to Masashi as more people
started to buy and indulge in this story; no doubt some games companies have
completed the same thing by either releasing DLC, or by putting it in
HD/sequels.
One of the newest games: Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White
Witch is a co-operation between a famous animation studio: Studio Ghibli and an
amazing game studio: Level-5. Dennis
Lee, Senior Global Brand Manager of Namco Bandai stated Namco personally
researched on Studio Ghibli and Level-5, taking into consideration the awards
and recognition they’ve both received
over the years and how much faith and trust people have put into their work-
making them extremely powerful powerhouses. If they were to collaborate on a
game together then immediately a huge amount of people would consider playing
the game without knowing what it’s about. Now that Ni No Kuni has been released
around 67,000 unites have been sold in the USA alone making an estimated profit
of around 2 million already.
On my part for researching I’ve taken into consideration
what are my favourite games and why, I noticed Elemental Wolves genre does
focus on my favourite genres as well (action-adventure, RPG, platform). It
shares similarities with:
·
Okami- wolf combat, drawing features and animal
recognition.
·
Pandora’s Tower- deciding on whether to make or
break relationships with characters; possibly having more than one ending.
·
Professor Layton- solving riddles in side quests
to gain locked content.
·
Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess- mounted
combat.
·
Spyro the dragon: Dawn of the Dragon- limitless
flying.
For this FMP our group consists of five people, all of which
have gained some degree in computer game design, development, animation ect and
have had experience in the industry as a tester or have worked a little for
someone else. Between the five of us, we all have divided the jobs an AAA
production team have so each of us have
a shared amount of work, meaning each we
will be working on the aspects of game development we personally enjoy
most compared to other team mates that hate a certain aspect- generating less stress and saving time. For other jobs that will require us to pay
money like audio and legal terms, we researched on what other companies would
pay employees and started advertising and asking people to join our group later
on in the production. Also we thought about giving other people a chance from
sites off Youtube and Deviant Art to help with musical scores and enrolling
them into KawaiixFukuro Studios as voice actors-this way they could help us by
spreading the word around about our game and we can get them recognition, if
your product was to be a success.
We’ve given ourselves budget of £150,000 that we hope can be
produced from crowd sourced funding otherwise because we all work there is a
chance of going independent and managing to raise 30,000 between us. Hopefully
if our pledge becomes a success it means that’s we can use an original
intellectual property licensing where we can created the game for ourselves
instead of being told what to do under a publisher’s firm.
There are dangers with this; it could mean our work gets
stolen once people see it on places like Kickstarter or Deviant Art if we were
to place concept pieces up. A way to tackle this would be to get copyright so
our work is protected even though it means extra costs. If research wasn’t done
right then the public might not be interested so our product would flop or if
were able to release our game through Xbox, PS3 or Wii-U they might not be
interested and no one would be overseeing our work. If were my team members
were to give up the whole concept of the game would be a complete and utter
waste of money and time. My idea is to conduct weekly meetings where we share
our progress that’s been produced at home, whilst once a fortnight doing
something other than working on our games as a stress-relief plan. There’s no
time limit in which we have to finish the project by, we plan to work four
hours each day at home or together at someone’s house in order to keep up a
steady routine; we aspire to finish our product in 2-3 years’ time.
If this were for triple a titles like Mass Effect there
would be a large amount of team members, for example 42 people worked on Mass
Effect compared to the team who created Thomas Was Alone which consisted of two
people. For AAA titles they usually cost a lot of money but are protected by
publishing firms like Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, EA ect and have licensed
intellectual property which in a way makes work a lot easier but it means more
stress, less money and your boss can pick and choose what he likes instead of
it being a personal decision which in some ways is good.
After all the research has been conducted and the concept
has been made official team members place all the work in a concept
documentation, so that when the proposal date comes around everything is ready
for our investor(s) to look through.
Elemental Wolves Concept:
Players play as Faith, a teenage girl of low-status that
wanders around Osaka’s streets, unknowing her true heritage as princess of a
parallel world: Crystal Dynasty. After being caught by a secret underground
organisation led by two English aristocrats, Faith is forced to endure a
Sekkusu house’s torture that begins to start her self-revelation slightly
changing her internal and external flaws. Being branded as ‘un-broken’, Faith
is thrown into a dungeon where she meets twelve Elemental Wolves that helps her
return to her normal realm. Shortly after arriving the player begins to
understand the calamity of which Crystal Dynasty has been thrown into, and now
as Faith must fight against her own blood to recover the throne and return her
world into a utopia by controlling the elements and befriending nature’s
brethren. Elemental Wolves revels in action-adventure/ RPG gameplay aimed
towards a target audience of teenagers and adults, the player must engage in
fighting combos, learn fourteen elements, conquer mounted combat and engage in
missions across the land. The gamer also has the choice to strengthen or break
relationships with other characters that could change the game’s ending
dramatically.
Otherwise the players can engage in back-to back combat with
others across the world, using different characters that are unlocked by doing
side-quests instead of having to download DLC. Reasons why we’re not engaging
in releasing DLC is because it could attract more fans knowing they don’t have
to spend more money to get extras, and if we couldn’t get the game released on
mobile/game platforms then it isn’t going to cause any complications.
Documentations
The next set of processes would be to engage in three
documentations for feasibility, technical and design. Feasibility focuses on
what the project is, needed for, how we’ll fund it and the time it’s going to
take. Technical is about the handling, functionality of a technical product or
a product under development /use. Design is writing a cleverly-crafted document
which communicates the design decisions to fellow peers or mentors, meaning it
can be written in two forms.
It has been known though that because technology, development
teams tend to skip or at least dread filling in these documents which could
cause some problems later on. In our team of five when it came to writing these
documents we’ve written them together so each of us has an understanding of the
topics so no confusion will be present later, it also saves time in the long
run as we don’t have to create two separate design documents for ourselves and
a mentor; which would no doubt be the investor.
Prototype
Before anyone starts creating the real game, people will
release prototypes or short demos which can be used when making a proposal to
certain investors or stakeholders. It’s also a way to receive some public
opinions on your game which you can use before presenting anything to anyone
else. A good place to share these demos would be on live networks for
Microsoft, PSN or Virtual Console; other places would be at certain expos (MCM
Comic Con, Gamescon or E 3). In some cases you could distribute the demos amongst
gaming college or university students. When the Wii-U was being tested, they
put up a Zelda demo at E3 in 2011 which received various opinions and comments
about the new style, in the end it helped Nintendo because it’s been announced
they plan to release a Wind Waker HD version on this platform. Compared to this
another game known as Rhythm Thief was released on Virtual Console as a demo
version only, after so many good reviews saying how promising the game looks
the creators suddenly brought it out on 3DS.
With our prototype we’re creating a short demo version of
the game which will show the player delving into the brush techniques used for
elements, leading onto a rendezvous point of dragons. Trailer and cut scene
clips will be present so people can not only see the gameplay but the art style
as well, hopefully this will entice a bigger audience- especially if it can be
presented at certain cons or allowed on live arcade, PSN or Virtual Console
later on after pitching, keeping in mind it will be at a price.
Proposal, Plan and Pitch
As I said before our funding will hopefully be crowd
sourced, we’re pledging for £150,000 to get the game finished in two years. On
Kickstarter we’ll be posting up rewards for those who back us in the production
as well as giving weekly updates on the process of the game. In the description
there will be a break-down of what we could achieve with the money and pieces
of the concept, art, musical scores and a description of the team and our
education/ experience. We’ll also offer up the chance for people to ask us
questions and will respond as quickly as possible. Later on if the
crowd-funding becomes a success and the game is being made, we will then pitch
our product to Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony about gaining a deal where our game
can be digitally distributed and reviewed obviously paying the costs. For
example Microsoft Live Arcade state we’ll have to pay £99 each year and they
get 30% of our earnings.
Another plan is if the crowd-funding failed then we would go
independently raising money through work or loans initially gaining £30,000
each before we start, ultimately doing the same as before.
Design
Instantly we started making our prototype that’s going to be
used for our Kickstarter pitch, during this time two members of the group were
allowed to focus solely on creating an animated trailer for the pitch, as well
as making another animation of the main character giving an interview about
Elemental Wolves. After adding this on Kickstarter and writing down all the
details given some of the concept art and work was done before the prototype,
Elemental Wolves soon became a ‘big hit’ in the public’s eye.
Eventually our pledge became a success going just over the
£150,000 mark with people from across the world joining us to have their little
input in the game. Another good thing was that between the five of us in a
short space of time, the team managed to bank £8000 and was cleared to have a
loan if needed.
During the start of Elemental Wolves we paid for flight
expenses of international supporters who backed us in the £1000 margin, it’s
then we worked on their little inputs of designing their unique characters and
setting up places for them to name. Our
team worked hard on the basic model shapes, concepts, settings, scripts and level
designs and animations; with our success on Kickstarter Nintendo were very
interested in releasing the game for the Wii-U. However in an agreement they
would receive 40% of what we earned but they would allow us to keep our IP,
protecting our designs with copyright, after agreeing we started breaking down
the semiotics of Wii-U controls for the game. What we didn’t know was Sony
wanted Elemental Wolves to be released through the PSN network. We were now
completing our Alpha milestone.
Code Freeze
One of our team members enjoyed the programing side
immensely and took on most of the programming tasks, with a couple of other
team mates left to help him if need be. In the meantime most of us started
getting to work on the level and asset creation, with having intervals by
working on something else so no one got bored and any mistakes personally found
in the modelling or animation for example could be fixed, before our programmer
released the code-freeze. After nearing an end in the programming we started picking
up on the art and audio production, to have a break from work we met our voice
actors and had fun messing around with the character’s voices before letting
the pros do their work, in the same week the team started trying to record FX
sounds and had fun creating tunes with our hired composer. Personally one of
the greatest things were getting people off Youtube and Deviant Art involved
for voice acting, creating music or even indulging in fan-art. That way more
amazing people can get recognised and so can we which will also help with the
current fan-base.
At least we
‘code-freezed’ the game
Beta, Code-Release
and Gold Master
At last things were coming to an end and we were allowed to
release Play Station 3 and Wii-U demos to testers provided by both Nintendo and
Sony, unfortunately there were a few minor bugs in the software but it wasn’t
anything that couldn’t be dealt with. After a couple of different demos our
code once again became frozen and was allowed to be moved on to conventions. We
picked three of the major conventions that sprung to mind: E3 - Los Angeles,
Gamescon-Cologne and London MCM Expo May
and October, we were granted permission to set up our game demo’s along with us
titles and we even got invited to set up the gear at Santiago’s Comic Con
supported by Deviant Art.
In the end Nintendo physically distributed our art promotion
in quality stores like GAME, Grainger Games, Block Busters, Harvey’s and
WHSmiths, as well as our game Elemental Wolves. Sony released it on Play
Station Network and thousands of units were sold. Our loyal backers on
Kickstarter got their rewards all signed by the team and we all earned quite a
bit of money. Our next step now would be to create a sequel or possibly look
into other medias for the same story.
Websites
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Journals and Books
7.
NEO Magazine
8.
Dark Horse Comics-Hyrule Historia Book (Released
February 2013)
