TBS: Development P.1

Sadly when we went back to the drawing board on that Friday we were missing two members; both turned out to be frequently absent. In hindsight it might have been possible to have avoided ones later absences if they had been in on the weeks of conceptualisation at all as now they feel left out, and with our lecturer's advice are not 100% on the game, however there was nothing we could do at the time about someone who was absent 90% of the time and it would have been unfair on all of use to backtrack on the one concept those of us who attended every day could finally contribute to fully because of one team member who wouldn't come in, contact us, or pull their weight, no matter how vital their role may have been.
To come up with our next concept I was inspired by one of the Green-lit team's presentations, Big Kid, where they had a slide on User Stories, a part of Agile that we are working under. User Stories are usually market research for what the market wants, like a questionnaire of what gamers in the genre want, however as this is a game that is unlikely to be published and one for university as well as being low on time for the overall project and having lost a month of that time on Odette we could not properly market research real User Stories and used our own personal user stories. Like Big Kid did we documented our own user stories of our favourite games & why, what we liked in games and what we wanted to make, then collage them together to make something, this was a suitable fix to the issue of always getting stumped on following a singular person's concept and made a game that we were all invested in and felt a part of, making a proper flat-hierarchy.
We had varied interests, some preferring aesthetics, some story & characters, some a mix of the two, I like most things when they are Reconstruction or deconstructions of tropes, and we found the members who preferred game play and mechanics preferred games with strategy. We decided we wanted to make a Turn-Based Strategy game with fantasy and RPG elements, with unique and developed character interactions and story, with a new spin on the fantasy strategy genre that did not follow the typical trope for fantasy races and worlds so we could create our own races and our own history and lore. I prompted at the end of the day that we should all take our time to develop and come up with our own individual races to add to the concept so we could all contribute a section of the story that had our own influence and investment into the game. We worked on it individually on the weekend. We wanted our game to have each of our own identity into the game so we would feel emotionally invested in contributing. The results were better and more diverse than we expected, and ironically we all managed to create races that followed the same elemental and anthropomorphic theme so they would easily link together and could easily spawn a story together.

A story board animation of what a scrapped idea for a cut-scene would look like at the start of the game, implying most of the plot points. 

I had a basic idea of a plot. At the start the mechanics I had thought of involved multiple (7) races that a player you'd pick from and would follow the campaign of, each one invading (and one defending) a country and claiming dominance as the goal, and in each campaign they would interact and encounter the other races at some point and fight them, each plot-line being slightly different as the order of the encounters depends on the campaign, giving an emotional link to the player that a character they might have played as on their first campaign and become attached to they would have to kill themselves in a different campaign. We also wanted each race to have different relationships to the other races depending on their history and lore, but would develop that together in meetings after we had the basics of our races.

Visualisations of the campaign routes

A visualisation of emotional plot points I had brainstormed for the scrapped plot.