Submerged

For One of our lessons that we had with Ewan, we had to get into groups and design a concept of a game. The concept is the idea, what the story entails, who are the characters, what is the environment like and how do you win, etc. The main part of lesson was design a "One Sheet". A One Sheet is essentially only one sheet that explains the general outline of the project. Its a way of communication from getting information from the developers to the concept artists.

Maximo's One Sheet.

We got into groups with the people sitting around us and I was pleasantly surprised and pleased with who was there. I had all the members of the foundation degree that I did last year in my group. This was good in a way as we already knew each other and could spend the hour that we had to straight away get involved with the work.

We started off discussing what type of game would it be, for example would it be horror? would it be adventure? so we all decided that it would be best if we started to write these down in the form of mind maps. This way we can gather everyone's ideas and then combine to get a true idea that suits everyone. This is the way that my mind map came out:

My mind map.

The story that we started to come up with was a horror survival. We took a lot of inspiration off of games such as Slender. Now that we had the general genre for what our game was going to be, we now had to create the story line, the game-play and how you would win. After a much heated discussion in our group, this was what we had:

The Story Line: 

You wake in the bed of an American home, no one is about and the only thing that you see is a ring on your finger, so you know that you are married. After roaming the halls of this house, very surreal things start to happen, the walls start to layer in pipes and submarine parts start to appear everywhere. There is water covering the floor which starts to raise itself. By solving several challenges and discovering who you are, only then are you free from this dreamworld.

The Game-Play:

Throughout the game you will be tasked with solving several puzzles. One such we had was locating and looking through the periscope found in the lounge. There recedes the deepest, darkest parts of your mind, trying to discover the tragedy that fell upon you, being trapped at the bottom of the ocean and losing hundreds of men. The water rising in certain levels acts like a timer, if you do not complete it quick enough, you will drown. This is a game where the environment is the danger.

How You Win:

By solving all these puzzles and locating a way out of the house/submarine, only then can you leave that dream world and be returned to your loved ones that you are fighting for so badly. You need to discover all of the past of this character and beat the demon that has been haunting you all these years.

Our collective One Sheet

I really did enjoy this task and I'm really pleased with the way we worked professionally as a group. I would like to keep an eye on this project as we all felt that if we worked on it, it could blossom into something much brighter.