So here it goes..

So starts a new term and a new challenge is ahead of me. A few weeks ago, on our first lesson back, we were set our new task that will take us up to the end of the academic year. Our task is to develop a game to a beta standard. Exciting? You bet. This is what I've been waiting for since I first started this course.

Straight away we were split into three development teams and given the brief for the project. It didn't sink in straight away that we were suddenly a game studio working on our very first game! We were also given a stimulus to give us a starting point for our game. Ours was 'Multiple Realities', which I was extremely happy with as it's a broad concept with plenty of potential for a good and original idea. I was also happy with my team, we are all honest and hard working guys who are willing to give our all for this project and our excitement was evident. The only problem was that we are the only team without an actual artist. Due to there being just two artists in our class, this was to be expected. However, we are all willing to pull together and work it out. The good news is that, we have a few dedicated programmers so I'm not worried about that aspect of the project which lets me focus a lot on the design which is what I really want to do, and I can also spend some time working on my art too.

Our first stumbling block came straight away as our first task was to think of a studio name and come up with a logo. We spent the rest of that lesson just coming up with ideas and this is the list that we came up with:

eclipse
perpetual
blue whale
m-theory
underdog
fallback
black hole
parallel
zebra
flux
lumen
obtuse turtle

However, none of us could really agree on any of these for our actual name. I could tell some of the guys weren't too into some of the names and the breakthrough came on our facebook group when people started chipping in with some new ideas. Here are a few of them:

NinjaSoft Games,
Spotlight Studios,
Groundhog Games &
Lab Rat Games.

Everyone seemed to decide straight away on Lab Rat Games, which was also my favourite and then Phil started mocking up a logo which turned out to be really cool. This was the first one he posted on the group.

I loved this logo but we felt it was a little complex.. So Phil quickly simplified his design and we ended up with this logo..

I really loved this logo, and straight away we all seemed to agree on Lab Rat Games and this sweet logo. It was the first step in what will be a difficult project for us all and we were glad to get it out of the way so we could start thinking about the game itself.

Personally, I couldn't stop thinking about the game, I already had a solid idea in my head and we had planned to discuss ideas in the next lesson so I began thinking about it more in depth. I was losing sleep thinking of all the possibilities that we could explore thanks to our multiple realities concept.

My next update will contain details as to what happened when we got together to discuss concepts and what we went with and how that has evolved.

Peace out for now!