It has been a really long three weeks of non-stop brainstorming, refining, writing proposals, and then going back to the drawing board again and again. Not only was coming up with new viable ideas itself tough enough, but whenever we settle on what we think internally is a decent idea, it gets rejected or shot-down by someone else. Designers worked overtime every single day (including weekends)… but ideas are improving, and we finally have one that actually looks good. It’s only the start of everything though.
Here are some snapshots of our rejected ideas:
Paper Prototyping (scans) – This ALMOST became our final idea but we dropped it in the end.
Art done by Yan Ling (programmer)!
Digital Prototyping for a real-time battle system.
We eventually scrapped that for a turn-based battle system instead.
Our Artists have also been churning out concept art pieces non-stop to help flesh out our game ideas better. Insane stuff coming from them in just 1-2 days every time we come up with new (decent) game ideas. I’ve personally never really worked with artists before and this is just mind-blowing. Here’s just a small portion of what they came up with:
Some concept art for the first game
Concept art for a battle against a boss-like creature
Programmers can’t start on much proper work without a concrete game idea, so whenever they are not helping the designers prototype, they’ve just been exploring how to make a variety of different game genres/types so that when we finally settle on something they won’t have to waste time learning it from scratch. But now that we more or less have something proper to work on for the next two weeks, work is going to finally ramp up for everyone.
Signing off,
Brandon
_NaNicStudios Game Designer / Producer
_NaNicStudios 