A New Project

At the beginning of our third year of university we were given a completely free reign assignment where we could pretty much do whatever we wanted. These kind of projects are obviously the most fun as you can let your imagination run wild and think up game ideas that you would love to see in real life. Wanting to save the idea of my most recent project for my final project this year, i wanted to do something different and perhaps work in a group, so with the help of my two peers Stuart and Bas we started to design what we thought of as 'the perfect zombie game'.

We are all fans of zombie games and so have played most of the mainstream zombie titles including Dead Island, Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising, Resident Evil and Call of Duty: Zombies, yet we felt none of these games encompassed everything we wanted in one game. Some games excelled in graphics but lacked in story, whereas others had great characters but were missing an incentive to make the player want to play. 

Before we started designing we wrote down the games that we thought had a lot of positive features and which we would like to take inspiration from. For me, Resident Evil Outbreak was a huge inspiration, although the game suffered from bad controls and no recurring story throughout it's levels, it had brilliant character design and a unique take on the apocalypse where you were simply a civilian caught up in the madness and you had to rely on other people to guarantee you safety as well as being a bad ass. 

Our Initial Concept

Although we all wanted to create 'the perfect zombie game' it quickly became apparent we all had conflicting views on what perfection really was. Ideas ranged from a full sandbox game to a linear story to a mass of characters to just a core group of survivors. It was hard work trying to write down just one idea we agreed on and it started to look like this project was doomed. However, in a moment of jest, Stuart proposed a zombie game set some time in Queen Victoria's rule. Instantly we were all interested in the project again, ideas started flooding in and we agreed on most of them. 

The moment we changed ideas

Our new idea had a lot more possibilities and you can see how many we came up with above. We decided the game would be a third person shooter with elements of survival horror and some elements of comedy. The moody lighting and scenery would give the horror aspects whereas the comedy could come the sheer absurdity of some situations, for example we decided early on we wanted an epic final boss battle against a zombified Queen Victoria on top of a zeppelin and a penny farthing getaway was mentioned more than once.

Below is a spider diagram of ideas i drew up to give us a better grasp on what we were aiming for.

Happy with the direction our project was heading in we decided to split up tasks for each group member to do so we could play on our strengths. Although we would all have input into most ideas such as character relationships, scenery and level design, we split the work so that Stuart was in charge of 3D modelling, Bas took on finished concept art and I was tasked with designing the costumes and writing the story and character bios. But first we had to actually design characters and a setting and i had to come up with a story that we could base our ideas off of, but I'll talk about that in my next post.