Blog:
AESIR
This is my final year blog on our Narative game: Aesir. Included is a quick rundown of what was done each week, and a breakdown of some key or interesting parts of the development process.
Week 1:
Week 1 has been a very productive session.
Hope gave us a lot of information on being the perfect hire. We focused on what games companies will be looking for, and how we can improve our chances at standing out from the crowd. We took a look at the job listings & recruitment processes of some large scale companies such as Ubisoft. Due to this, I have completely remade my blog, moving from a Wordpress based host (I created in my foundation year) to a new blog on Wix. My previous blog had visual problems and was very restrictive, and it would have been too hard to create a distinct and impressive portfolio on such tech.
We heard from a guest speaker that Hope called in, 'Edward Waterhouse-Biggins'. He ran us through what it is like to be a Junior Games Developer, and his time going from Kingston, to Team17, and finally to Rebellion.
Week 2:
We looked at some Narrative projects from the Previous year, and analysed what made them impressive. We took a look at the structure of what makes a good narrative game, and sat down with Mike to learn about his game last year, based on the Legend of Arthur. He ran us through how he made his game, as well as giving us some good tips on how to work on a narrative game. Through this, we started brainstorming ideas for our narrative game, and we settled on the idea that it should be based off of mythology.
Mythology is a great subject to base your narrative game off of. You have a solid set of rules, relationships, characters and stories that you are able to pick from. This gives you a guide on your key parts of your story, however mythology is great for stories for another reason. Since Mythology doesnt belong to anyone, and is widely agreed to be 'stories' or 'fiction'. This gives you creative freedom to take parts of mythos that you don't like, or dont suit the narrative, or wouldnt translate well to gameplay.
We ended this session agreeing to go home and think about our favourite mythology, and consider which stories could be adapted for our game.
Week 3:
After breaking last week trying to think of ideas for mythology, this week we solidified our idea. We all enjoyed Norse Mythology, and with it being popluarised in recently media with things such as 'God of War' and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we figured it would be the most interesting Mythos to follow. We all started scouring around to see what would translate well from folklore to game.
While we worked on getting our narrative idea set in stone, in lecture we learned about the importance of writing out a story line, as well as what should be included. We looked at the Heroes Journey, and disected the seperate parts of the journey. We thought about what would make an interesting story and an enaging hero, and we decided on creating a female lead to our story. Since our class is mostly male, we thought this would be an interesting change, and we agreed that the world needs more great female leads.
As we discussed our favourite parts of the Norse mythology, we found that Loki was a favourite for our team, and that our game would be revolving around him. He's clearly best suited to be a villian, so now we had our antagonist, and a rough idea for our protagonist.
Throughout the week we found information on Baldur and Skadi, and our story started taking place.
Week 4:
Work was done on the storyline, and in class we looked into Storylines and Storyboards. Storylines are used to write out the basic premise of the game, from start to finish. The idea isnt to have a huge document detailing everything that happens in the game, but instead to provide a brief overview of the main story elements as they progress from start to finish. Lukas was put in charge of creating the storyline & storyboard, however all of the team provided ideas in creating Aesir.
Week 5:
This week we started to look at mechanical documents, as well as looking at some scene scripts.
I decided this week I would start putting some effort into our script design. Since Lukas had finished off the storyline, we set about to deciding what section of the game we were going to translate into a playable prototype.
This didn't take too long, as we could all tell what part would translate best to our game. The midway point of the game shows our Protagonist Lugertha that infact the evil demon that she slays at the midgame boss fight is not the God Loki like she expects, but infact her Father, Ragnarson (Also known to the gods as Baldr).
This was the obvious part of the game that would grab the viewer, surely they would be enthralled and would be keen to see how our heroes story ends.
With that decided, me and Lukas set out to create the script.
We created a rudimentary script that explained some previous points of the game (which you wouldn't get to experience in our prototype, so we wanted to catch the player up to speed).
Week 6:
No work was done on the game this week.
We did work on our CV's, having a talk with Adam Macintosh from EA games. He told us what future employers would look for in a CV, as well as how to structure it.
I began work on my CV, as I dont want to leave it too late. Soon, lots of students will start applying for jobs, and if I am too slow I'll end up missing out on lucrative offers.
Not only this, but I have also started networking on Linkdin, adding my previous lecturers, current lecturers, and any guest speakers that we have had over our time at Uni. I have also started adding games companies, and started looking over their recruitment process, as well as engaging with what jobs are currently being advertised.
Week 7:
This week we had a lecture focussing on how to make Cinematic Games. We had Jessie Burland-Lokko give a remote talk on how to create Cinematics in Unreal Engine 4. He walked us through the key parts of using Sequencer, such as utalising transforms, explaining the playback controls, or running us through how the timeline works.
Week 8:
This week I have started with the creation of our first Cinematic. I have recorded voice lines with both members of my group and people outside of University that wished to help.
I have taken key shots laid out in our storyboards, and recreated them in Unreal Engine. By utalizing these storyboards I can see exactly where a shot needs to start, or the important section that the shot must portray.
Since each shot takes 10 seconds, I had to then expand on each shot with some movements I believe make the shots more dynamic. For example, where the first storyboard called for a long shot across the path the Heroes take during their initial conversation, it was decided this didn't translate very well into the full cinematic. The shot was too static and didn't look very impressive. The rest of the week was spent improving on shots, figuring out what made a camera shot look good, and editing small parts of Audio.
Week 9:
This week was spent working on a lot of my Final Year Project. While I focussed mainly on that this week, I have been going back and recording new voice lines and editing the script for our current cutscene.
I have found a few issues with the script that we put together. The original version tried to highlight that Lugertha is aiming to be the first Female viking, a notion that would have been seen as foolish at the time. While we tried to convey this through the script, it was determined that the current version was far too hostile, especially when one of the two characters would soon be giving his life to save Lugertha. This week I focussed my attention and free time that I had for this project on the voice work.