24 HOURS OF GAME DESIGN

Contrast06

Check the website for the teams. I'm in the K.O. team. You can easily spot this guy with the blue Italian winning World Cup celebration t-shirt. I should have given the link before the competition as they update it throughout the 24 hours.

Well, why are we called K.O.? During registration, we are requested to come up with the team name. Out of the 10-11 teams, there are only 2 left in the end who still cannot figure out a name for the team. We argued, suggested and commented on the different names possible but I loved the name PWNSTARS! I wish we go for that! A team member said it will be politically incorrect and will create alot of problems for us in the competition. Haha! Shit, I wish we are called Pwnstars. It sounded so cool. We went from Critical Damage to 16 Hit Combos to Critical Error to whatever craps you can think of and decided to go for Knock Out in the end. Double Knock Out will be nice. Oh well....

Our team has two ideas so we pretty much debated on that for hours the day before to finalize it. The story is quite similar but it is just the gameplay idea which is totally different. I like the non-conventional way which I find quite out of this world but I guess that's how game design should be. There is no point designing very traditional gameplay genre which are available in the market because it has been done many times over. What else is new?

In the end, on the day itself, we got our subthemes and we were ready to roll! We even decided on which idea to take with voting! In the end, of course the more weird style of gameplay was chosen and we went off to design! I spent the most of the first 12 hours colouring all the characters with the weaker version of Photoshop called Paint.net because it is free. One of the team members have a friend to compose great music for us while I used my rendering skills to get great backgrounds for the game.

Honestly, we are all quite new to this software and in the end, we did not manage to completely design the game to what we wanted. Time was against us as we were ambitious in putting in too much Artificial Intelligence into the gameplay. AI forces alot of programming to solve the bugs as there are just too many interactions in the game. However, we hope we can at least get one of the prizes as I think we showed our gameplay idea enough. After the competition, we have a review of all the games created and I honestly feel ours is a game that is not well documented. Others look like a finished product ready to be sold in the market. Porfessionally done and I cannot argue since they are from the background of using the software and gone through those modules before.

Well, whathever it is, I had fun, great exposure, great experience and met up with some gamers. The rest is not of great importance. Met up with Mr. Damien Chee who programmed Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate who gave us some good ideas and comments so that was a great memory itself!