Wednesday, March 18, 2009

FairyTales Development: Preliminary Design

First off, the overall concept setting has gone into a complete overhaul. Same characters, same game, new story, new environment, darker twist. Our first prototype will be released sometime next week and balancing issues and gameplay mechanics will be going through a stress test whole month long.

Although there's nothing much to share in this post,what I can promise is that the full story will be completed by this week. Plus, more concept art in the coming week. Stay tuned!

Friday, March 6, 2009

Game Development: FairyTales

One of my final projects for this term will be to create a game using Microsoft's XNA development tools. My team (Idle Hands) decided to work on a 2D side-scroller hack & slash game. Borrowing gameplay features like combo systems, button sequences and such.

Progress started with the idea of using a theme surrounding fairytales. After deciding on the theme, we moved on to establishing a core plot: that came to be as the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Of course, we tried to push things furthur, by giving the story a twist of our own. The project started on the working title Once Upon A Time... and finally moved on to FairyTales after the entire team (art, design and tech) made a final decision.

Title logo design by me.

Concepts were started immediately for the title logo, main heroine and of course the villian. Several key characters that we tried to incorporate into the main plot were taken from various other fairytales. Although we're not sure if any of those will make it into the final game, we're having high hopes.

Not much can be say about the overall plot yet as the script has yet to be finalized. Being the scriptwriter/scenario writer, for the past three years has helped me to plan ahead. Below is a concept for Red Riding Hood, done by one of my team's artist: Bengt.

Red Riding Hood character design by Bengt.

Stay tuned for future updates. FairyTales will be released for the PC and will support the 360 controller. If all goes well, we'd like to release it for the 360 as well.