Mobile Game Prototype: Enter The 'Maize Maze'
Howdy there 🤠welcome to week 5's blog post!
After last week's post, my team and I reconvened mid-week to share our different ideas and see what we had come up with. We had a few ideas between us and presented them to our lecturer for feedback, and we decided to take components from 2 of the ideas and merge them together.
And thus, the "Maize Maze" was born! This idea focuses the user trying to escape from a maze made of...maize, within a limited number of moves. Without giving too much away, that's the core premise for this idea, and we all rather like it. Once we finished getting feedback, we carried on discussing what sort of gameplay elements we could have in the game, how our level designs would be done, and how we should go forward with this game concept.
So, I took note of the ideas we had for both things we would definitely like to include and things we might try including if we get time for it, and created a Trello board for our team so that we could visually see the tasks. We felt that it'd be fun to name the board after one of our members, as the core idea came from him originally!
Between the 3 of us, we won't restrict ourselves to solely one role so that we have flexibility to help each other, but my general roles will be the team leader and artist for our game. Since my strong suit is doing pixel art, we will most likely be making this a pixel art styled game with a top-down view, similar to something like the original Legend of Zelda.
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Now That Sounds Like A Cool Game! What's The Next Phase?
In terms of immediate plans, nothing significant will likely happen to this project until after the weekend, mainly because another assignment is due at the end of Friday, so my attention will be taken up completing that first. Afterwards, I plan to start drawing up some assets for us to use for building up the level's appearance - so tiles like the maze walls that are made up of maize, the ground, the exit and key etc.
As we have been receiving mentoring from one of the senior developers at King Studios (the guys behind Candy Crush), we might also run this idea past her to see what feedback she may have for us.
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Oh, right, we've been receiving guidance from one of the senior developers at King. I may have forgotten to mention this previously, so uh... surprise! We've had them join every couple of weeks to our Teams meetings for this module, along with a former QA tester for Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 who has given us some insight into what working in QA is like at one of the biggest gaming companies in the world, so that was really cool!
Anyway, we might see about running our idea past the senior dev and see if they have any suggestions or food for thought for us.
I've also been given some feedback from my lecturer regarding my online portfolio and blogs, and seems like so far everything is on the right track. Big relief considering this blogging is a whole new venture! There's a few areas to tweak, so I'll update them whenever I get a chance to improve my site throughout the coming year.
And I think that about covers everything for this past week! A couple of days were lost due to travelling around the country, hence why this post is a day late, but hopefully that's fine for everyone. So, thanks for continuing to read the posts, and I'll be back with some updates this weekend! Buh bye! :)