Meeting 4/29/13

Attendees: Kirk, Bingie, Justin, Dan, Alex

Notes:

• Discussed the cave layout
• Discussed the various 2-D interactions
• Discussed creating one large grid map for the 2-D
• Assigning group members production tasks
• Discussed how the interaction with the Beast at the end will play out.
• Parameters set in the 2-D interactions will determine whether player is presented with a bone knife or bone flute
• Showing that there is two optional outcomes, while only letting the player take one, will increase replayability
• Discussed Torch Relighting mechanic

Week To-Do List:

Kirk

• Character modeling for 3-D Beast and Baby
• Alter
• Torch

Dan

• Concept Art for Alter, Torch, Tools
• Misc. 2-D Assets
• Various 2-D grid layouts

Bingie

• Concept Art for Baby Beast
• Bone Flute
• Bone Knife

Justin

• Basic Set-ups for each gameplay style
• Coding for End scene
• Coding for each scene type
• Coding for Torch (Flickering out/Relight)

Alex

• Basic Cave layout
• Update Gantt chart

4/28/13 Meeting

Attendees: Dan, Justin, Jason, Bingjie, Alex

Meeting Points:

Agenda:

-Discuss Level Design

-Assigning assets to People

-Beast's Den Scene - polishing it & decide how to tie it into the story

-Scene/Mechanics Breakdown

-What we can have our eventual high-schooler focus on

Discussion:
map design concept
Scene Description Spreadsheet

• 3D Assets
• torch
• flute/bone/weapon/thing
• skeletons
• tribe remains
• Beast
• Baby beast
• Programming / Technical
• scene setup in that allows for array images to be background
• Shaman scene
• wasd controls dance movements
• background characters doing those movements in a certain order
• player follows movements

April 21 Meeting

Dan, Bingjie, Justin

• To get Bingjie and Dan into a coding spree, we started them off with some stuff:
• Bingjie: limit player movement in painting using high/low/left/right bounds. 
• Dan: mess around with making a cool stampede effect for the predators.
• We also watched a documentary and made a shared file of some ideas that came from it.
• Moving forward, tomorrow's meeting (@ 11 or so) should probably cover (1) the story's exact details, (2) ways that story can influence over the game, (3) how to introduce these concepts, and (4) how we can build this stuff up to some epic ending.

Meeting Apr 15

Attendees: Bingjie, Dan, Justin, Jason, Alex

• Map out plot, discuss item significance, flesh out level design concept.
• Plot
• Item Significance
• General Designs
• Shell could signify defensive/thoughtful nature
• pottery - creativity
• feather - escape / speed
• quartz - shaman / mysticism / connection with earth
• tooth - violence / warrior
• arrowheads - inventiveness, aggression
• fur - warmth, kindness, violence (used on animal)
• Level Design Concept

Meeting Apr 11, 13

Apr 11 Meeting (11:00 pm)
Attendees: Justin Patterson, Dan Newman, Jason Kirk

• Briefed Kirk on some of the new ideas
• offering mechanics
• Web-like plot structure
• Kirk Offered Other Game Mechanic Concepts:
• What if objects were more abstract?
• Offering to paintings could perhaps be swapped with placing abstract offerings inside a central unit/column (could be a tomb, etc)
• Placing items is a minigame of sorts where the object needs to be rotated to fit
• Perhaps have different ways each object can fit
• Different permutations have different effects on plot

Apr 13 Meeting (12:00 pm)
Attendees: Dan Newman, Justin Patterson

Discussion:

• Discussed narrative structure and its relationship to the programming / technical implementation
• Art style of  physical world relationship to story line
• https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7gSSV9g9vfCY2xrLTVYM0FucGc/edit?usp=sharing 

4/10/13 Meeting

Attendees: Dan, Justin, Alex, Bingjie, Kirk

• How does paintings work?
• 3 Parts
• Brief cutscene (Find cave, everyone is afraid)
• Then you can play; character tires to go into the cave and they can't or something
• Goal is to get the story across
• Then the varying ending scenario
• Central hub kind of thing?
• Everything together unlocks some sort of end-game
• wolf being projected by shadows (but actually rocks or something)
• wall is coming to get you
• Maybe solution is to put out the torch
• Maybe putting out the torch is the answer
• Previous people go into cave; maybe you see the signature (hand prints) of people throughout the cave
• Build up to a boss fight, but no boss fight
• Myst - lead-up to something opposite (collect pages and then destroy book)
• Possible setup for interaction
• Dropping objects into an alter as an offering
• Rooms consist of an Act; Act consist of many scenes.
• Each scene takes an offering.
• Based on offerings, the payoff is an epic Act painting that plays on the ceiling
• input story, output story right after, input, output right after
• Each input story with offering has its own output

April 9 Class Notes

Presentation Slides

• Dynamic narratives aren't necessarily moving from one to the other; object oriented notion of narrative is based off of object oriented programming; classes have variables. When you collected enough variables of a class you can enter another class (trigger that class). Having a certain inventory system triggers certain elements
• fire - important for many things; fighting and cooking and etc. Making food made us smarter (cascading effect); benefit of warmth, protection, striking fear, hurting oneself.
• What if we made it more object oriented; make it less like a series of linear narratives
• first person world puzzles issues?
• what does the player DO at each painting?
• One interaction per painting where users can choose to activate that bit of story -- more paintings needed, easier to manage
• OR multiple interactions per painting that unlock different parts of the story? -- fewer paintings needed, harder to manage
• CONCERN: this could turn into a bunch of little minigames and that's a bad thing. needs a basic mechanic that is relevant in all paintings
• walk, run, pick up stuff, choose direction, engage/not engage :
• sneak (not run) from a predator
• try to kill a predator that might fail, or go back to village to gather peeps
• characters dying might have issues down the line for the plot
• node sets ('classes') can be a collection of variables
• takeaway - come up with VERY simple mechanisms that work. simple things to do at various points.
• kill an animal, your pickup motion can "eat" it
• boss battle at the end is a bit meh.
• maybe the reason why this thing appears is because something has desecrated sacred ground - what if player can undo it?
• maybe if you do fight, you realize that fighting was the wrong answer
• what if beast has a baby?
• something that uncovers what the thing is
• class input -
• single input system to represent life is "gamey" but interesting
• varied gameplay isn't possible with limited time and limited resources
• what does the player KNOW at the beginning of the cave? why do they know they're in a cave?
• how does the viewer know that you're trying to tell them the story of the first person character?
• symbol on the wall matches symbol on the hand?
• letter to open the story?
• first painting needs to be important
• jpatt sidenote - what if first painting is map-like; what if there's some sort of painting cue along the walls to imply walking direction.
• How do they know to interact with the walls?
• how does the player know what the goal is?
• platforming permanence - doing things has impact on how you can progress (failure to get food in first person platforming sequence, etc). do these things also happen in paintings?
• decide how we want player to play through experience

4/8/13 Meeting Notes

Meeting: 4/8/2013
Attendees: Jason, Alex, Bingjie, Dan, Justin

Discussion Notes

• Maybe the remains of characters on the ground in REAL world have the memories
• What if with the first person game idea, when you lit the beacon you took agency of the characters in it?
• Shadow dynamics - like the boar's head shadow from a rock 
• Puzzling NOT platforming, perhaps (in the context of the painting aspect)

Story Discussion

• Original story - is village burning current or historical?
• Story's interactive parts should hark to interactions of the game's 3d world 
• Story perspective could shift between predator and human
• Before having the characters get attacked by the bear, have more story to establish the village and the characters
• Audio narrative?
• As told by the shaman, wallpainting character (maybe)

GAME BEGINS

• Player knows nothing. Torch on wall. Walk up and pick up since NOTHING else is visible. Upon lifting, all of the paintings become slightly luminescent (and therefore giving the player places to move toward).
• Paintings have family tribe doing things and struggling for a few stories (making fire, surviving winter, etc)
• Then bear has his sequence later in

Apr 6 Meeting

Venue: Google Hangout
Time: 7:30 PM
Attendees: Dan Newman, Justin Patterson

Discussion Points:

• Adding "gray area" to the gameplay
• Shaman/Warrior dynamic is very binary, and its implementation and implications are unclear
• Perhaps focusing more on puzzles that have societal implications
• Puzzle Mechanics:
• Transmission of ideas (symbols)
• Exchanging ideas between warring factions to find common ground?
• Etc. just spitballing
• Physical nature of cave
• More narrative dynamic
• Perhaps have the pause/zoom-out be pangea, each continent a different tribe
• Each level is interaction with a tribe, these tribes could have relationships with one another (pos/neg/neutral)
• Perhaps a central monument that is either awesome looking or falling apart based on how well you unify everyone
• Did super predator hurt all of these tribes in some way?
• Perhaps there is a painter/painting dynamic
• The painter can destroy/create things in the world
• each painted object has a color that represents a culture or a tribe
• erasing one of those things weakens the tribe and thus takes their image away from pangea over time
• Light is still our most powerful narrative and visual symbol
• Maybe walking in a straight line, illuminating parts of the story (there are two stories, your seeing parts of both stories)
• What if this is 3D, the character is a caveman with a torch
• You can light certain beacons that initiate animation on the walls next to them
• Or, you can simply view stills of those paintings if you don't light their beacon (getting less of the story)
• 
  

Spring Term Week 1 Notes

• Our focus for the term should be to push the envelope in regards to the narrative of our game.  

• Currently the weakest area of our game is the player's decision on how to play the game: violently vs. passively.
• It's like trying to make two good game experiences vs. one.  
• Also, seems simplistic rather than creating a more complex narrative and creating a drive to act and respond a certain way.

• Suggestions
• Give the player different strategic choices throughout the game that influence the play.  
• Borrow from history
• Look into various empires throughout history and their philosophies on how to rule the people they conquered.
• Example: Persians

• Try to build up a history (this could play a major role in the game)
• Choices that generate parts of the narrative further along
• Example: By killing the chiefs son, war breaks out between tribes. 
• Could even have missing story chunks as if those parts were told with shadows/shadow puppets.
• Play up the language of the cave as a visual narrative.

• Symbol mechanic could be used to build a Rosetta Stone that is revealed later. 

By next week, we need to come up with ways to push our narrative further using.  We need to figure out what the player knows, what the player sees, and what the player does.  

We can use storyboards, the game mechanisms, and the choices made throughout the game to describe our planned changes.  We need to be able to supply a solid example of what one play-through of the might be like.