Gamocracy Dev Diary: Week Two

Greetings Gamocrats,

This has been a busy week for the Bearded Ladies as most of us are at GDC in San Francisco, but between meetings and hooking up with friends and colleagues, the work on Gamocracy is steadily moving on.

Last weekend the community decided the winner of the first challenge and, therefore, the story and the main character of our game. We were so pleased with the quality of all the submissions and we felt that the five finalists were all fantastic concepts that could be made into great games. The voting was tight all the way through but, in the end, the robot H-7 stepped forward as the winner.

“H-7 Adventure” by “the Sparta Ghost” is a neat little story about a robot trying to save mankind from an ongoing alien invasion. His ability to throw his own head and use it as a platform or weapon is what really made this idea stand out. It’s a really interesting game-mechanic and we will do our best to build the game around it, and make sure it is used in multiple ways throughout the game.

With a hero and game concept decided, Oscar started work on the design for H-7. The head was obviously our biggest focus as its design would affect the gameplay. We tried different shapes for the head to try to find something that would be easily recognized as a platform, without going too far from the original concept. Here are some of the different ideas we tried:

Oscar:
I wanted to give the robot an alien touch with oval forms and a mechanical design for the body with force fields connecting to the arms and legs. In the end I went back to make it match the original concept better and made it more simple compared to the first designs.

And here is how the final result turned out:

This week, the task was to come up with three levels that our hero will traverse during the game. We are sorry if we weren’t very clear that the task was to build a world for the winning hero. As the world design challenge was announced before the winner had been decided, we have to agree it got a bit confusing. So we will try to improve our instructions for the coming challenges. Nevertheless, we have seen some great ideas for this week’s competition and we are looking forward to seeing which one will end up in the game.

Join us and select the concept you like the most by visiting http://www.facebook.com/TheBeardedLadies and cast your vote on the best concept!

Next weeks mission is the “Game Mechanics Workshop” where you can join in on designing the gameplay mechanics for H-7. For more information on that and how to submit your idea check your local Gamocracy forums when week three launches next week.