Week 4.01: Reflection — Indie Game Business

…And they’re off! The Indie Studio Start-up module has officially started.

My initial fears have been allayed as during the kick-off seminar our tutors announces they had streamlined the content. This should ease the burden of creating and getting a business ready to launch and make more study-bandwidth available for the game concept development. So it’s a big thank you to the Falmouth Games Academy and specifically our course lead, module lead and module tutor for taking this initiative 🙂

The ever-present pressure is still on as our submission deadlines are on the 1st and 8th of December and, as I write this post on September 25th, that leaves about 9 1/2 weeks to complete the module.

Game Ideas

Coming into this module I had two game ideas I was considering:

• Mobile RPG
• VR adventure

Idea 1: Mobile RPG

The first of these is for a Steampunk RPG where the player chooses a faction such as Military, Enforcer or Scientist. Each will have their own, unique attributes, strengths and weaknesses. The goal would be to build and defend one or more bases, form alliances with other players and work together to defeat enemies whether they be AI driven or other players. What I liked most about this concept is the ability to apply it to other sub-genres like dieselpunk, teslapunk and cyberpunk through re-skinning and attribute tweaking. As it then evolves into an MMORPG, it would start to amass a large database of player bases that each sub-genre would have access to attack and trade with. The game would also re-skin each base to appear as the same sub-genre as the player. For example if we had two players, A and B who chose to play as cyberpunk and dieselpunk respectively, when they encounter one another, their bases, tech and armies would appear as the correct sub-genre. Player A would see the cyberpunk version of player B’s base and player B would see the dieselpunk version of player A’s base.

Other similar games to this would be Game of War: Fire Age , Vikings! War of Clans , and Clash of Clans .

Idea 2: Sorcerer’s Quest

Throughout module 730 I really enjoyed the VR development on the Oculus (Meta) Quest 2 and was surprised at how easy this was thanks to the hard work the folks at Unity had put in to make it so.

For this module (and the next) I was also very keen to continue with VR and, whilst watching the new Dr. Strange file, Multiverse of Madness, I thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool if I could give the player that spell casting experience?‘ With virtual reality (VR), this could indeed be possible. The idea was to use hand tracking and gesture recognition to allow the player to cast spells within the game. By combining this mechanic with a storyline I felt I had the beginnings of a first-person magic-based VR adventure game. I was also very keen to bring more narrative elements into my games to provide a richer experience for the player and create a platform upon which to develop true dynamic story arcs. This was an idea I’d had back in 2020 based on our lecture about Ergodic Literature and as yet haven’t had an opportunity to test the software architecture I have in mind to realise it.

Conclusion…

Both of these ideas are unworkable for this module. The scope is far too large in both cases and each presents a significant degree of technical risk, whether it be on-line play and back-end support as in the RPG game or the hand tracking and gesture recognition as in the second.

In the end I chose to go with Sorcerer’s Quest and to significantly limit the scope to just focus on the spell casting and battle mechanics for this module. This will limit the amount of work needed whilst still delivering a playable (and hopefully fun) experience similar to the ‘beat-em-up’ games like Tekken or Street Fighter but based around magic and spell casting. Visions of the wizard duel scene from Harry Potter and the Gandalf/Saruman fight scene from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers immediately sprang to mind. From here, this could then be further expanded in module 750 to bring in the quest and narrative elements needed to fulfil the remainder of this idea.

The VR games market is significantly smaller at only $1.6 billion forecast for 2022 compared the mobile games market forecast of $91.4 billion for the same period. Nevertheless, there are other reasons for choosing this type of game:

• It is far less likely to trigger the conflict of interest clause within my contract of employment should I choose to publish it although I would still need permission to go ahead
• Having spoken to a publisher at EGX London, there is a growing demand for VR games. Especially games that feature a strong narrative content

I have also chosen to use Unreal Engine (EU) for this module. The VR game my team developed in 730 was built on Unity and I would like to gain more exposure to UE before making a final choice for the dissertation project in module 750.

References

Photo by Faye Cornish on Unsplash