Working through ideas

After researching and playing some games that I thought would help me with my game idea, I decided I wanted to stick with the side scrolling and exploration aspect of the original FRED game. So I focussed my research on games that shared these traits and began thinking about how to incorporate them. I wanted to do a fantasy like setting with a dark undertone and highly stylised look to it. Similar to that of Outland that relying heavily on silhouettes and built up layers of background. I liked the ancient civilisation concept as well, this would also fit with the original FRED as you are trying to get out of an Egyptian tomb.

The games I played were all if not most for home consoles so I thought about doing something a bit different and doing a home consol type of game but making it for the iPad and make use of it’s touch screen functions. I made a mock up of a the game screen to work out how the controls would work, in the left bottom corner of the screen is a glowing circle this acts as an analogue stick and on the other side in the bottom right there is a smaller circle which is the jump button. The environment and some platforms can be moved and manipulated using the iPad’s touch screen functions. Doing this also allowed me to play around with the layout of the screen and the style I was aiming for, however at this point I was not fixed on an art style. I also did a first concept idea for the main character but like the environment I will be working on it further. At this point I was also thinking about plot and what would be the goal for the character to progress through the game. I wanted to add a lot more in the narrative aspect of the game, as FRED had little to no plot, and being a person who is very much interested in plot in games got bored quite quickly. Apart from getting out of the tomb there wasn’t really much else to the plot of FRED although in the remake of the game more plot was added.