Hello,

Work began this month on putting together the first draft of the concept overview document [COD], it’s been a while since I actually created one of these. I must have read nearly a hundred of these but only actually written about four of them. In writing a COD, the process helps raise many design issues. Things that you think you had sorted and are well design appear loose and poorly thought through once you put it into words. The game idea requires different themes and locations for each game level. I wanted to decide on the final 10 themes and create moodboards for each theme. Careful consideration was needed in choosing these themes as I wanted them to appeal to a wide mass-market audience. A quick focus-group around the office, along with a few raised eyebrows, confirmed that a few of the suggested themes were to specialised and required a re-think. It still makes me laugh that what you think has a broad appeal, has a completely different meaning to other people. The lesson here is put your ideas to people that know nothing about games [game industry marketing people included here J] and gauge their reactions. Ask these people, would you play a game based on X or Y?

I contacted a few video companies that are capable of creating a ripomatic movie for me. Of the ones I contacted, two are available and have the bandwidth, the third unfortunately are too busy. Before providing these video companies with the brief for creating the movie, I needed to get them covered with a NDA. Once I received the executed legal paperwork, I’ll send them the brief and wait on their feedback and costings. From a development point of view, a list of potential developers was drawn up with 7 teams making the short-list. A scope of work list required was also created covering motion library requirements, physics, audio specifications, renderer pipeline and graphical feature set.

Overall pleased with the progress this month but would really like to devote every hour of evey day to this project. The stop-start nature of doing this project coupled with a full-time day job can be frustrating at times. Oh well better to be too busy than watching daytime TV and playing pitch and putt.

Laters,

Ivan

This entry was posted by Catalyst Outsourcing, on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.