Benny the Socktopus and the Big Fat Distinction.

On Monday, we received feedback on our Game Design Document. I couldn't make the lecture as I had tickets for a gig, which really sucked because the GDD was my responsibility. I wrote the majority of it and formatted the whole thing and you'll know how stressful it was if you read this blog often. Our design tutor James is notoriously hard to please and is an expert at poking holes in your documents and this was my first time writing a GDD. I was nervous about the feedback as I didn't want to let the guys down. We had some negative comments about the Pitch Document and I wanted to improve on that this time around.

The feedback turned out to be great, a lot better than I had expected. In our tutor's own words it was a 'Big Fat Distinction'. I was proud of the document and I knew I had done the best I could and the work the other guys did for it was also to a high standard. I think the main reason that the document was a success was due to the extensive planning I did before we started. I researched GDD's thoroughly and planned our own accordingly. See my other blog post 'Plans. Important plans.' for more details. I was pleased that I could contribute to the team and that as a group we got some praise for this as we've all been working hard. I just hope that we can continue to produce a high standard of work and that we can achieve that elusive Big Fat Distinction for the whole project!

Since reading our GDD, James has really started to buy into Dimension Hop's story and it's characters. In particular he loved Benny the Socktopus. To thank Benny, I'm gonna post his character profile here. You're making waves buddy! Soak it all up.

Character Profiles

Benny the Socktopus



Name: Benny
Age: ???
Height: 4ft 2”
Race: Socktopus
Background: Benny is a creature lost to the very darkest depths of the Void. He is an octopus made of socks that has forgotten the feel of love and companionship. Even so he remains positive… I think. It’s hard to tell when he wears a vacant smile at all times. The immense loneliness he has felt for so long with only the voice in his head for company has made him rather absent minded. He may not be much help to Hop as his incoherent babble may be hard to understand but a friendly face is still welcoming.

Personality: Benny used to be a loving and funny Socktopus. However, not much of this remains other than his pleasant smile. He has very much become one with the Void and is a shrewd representative of the despair the Void can bring to a being and reminds Hop that he only has a limited amount of time to find his way back home before he ends up the same way.

Hour of Fun

Last week, in our production lecture, we were introduced to a development technique known as the 'hour of fun'. It is basically an hour (usually 4 o'clock on a Friday when creativity is at its minimum) where all the members of the studio will stop working and start play testing their game(s). Someone will usually observe the team playing and make notes on anything that works or doesn't work. They will then sit, as a group, and discuss the game and give any feedback or share any problems they had whilst playing the game. This technique has been adopted by development studios around the world. Studios such as Tim Schafer's Double Fine Productions and, our Production and Design tutors, Ben Hill and James Burton's very own indie studio White Paper Games.

As a class we then had our very own hour of fun. There wasn't many members of each team that attended this particular class but it was still very useful. I was the member of the team that was observing and making notes and it was really interesting seeing people attempting to play our short and breakable tech demo. I got a lot of great feedback in particular from my tutor Ben, who's experience in the hour of fun was evident as he tried his hardest to break the game in every way imaginable.

All in all we got some great feedback from the rest of the group and some things to work on but it wasn't anything we didn't already know about before. The tech demo level shows off the mechanics great but isn't exactly representative of what a final level design will look or play like in the finished version of the game. However, I did find it very interesting to see other people play the game for the first time. I feel that this technique will be extremely useful when we have a more playable level with real challenges which we should do in a few weeks when our Vertical Slice is ready. It will be very interesting next time round.

Bye bye!

A Whole New Level of Dimension Hopping

This level is the seventh out of the ten that we are aiming to create for Dimension Hop. We are also using this level for the Vertical Slice we are producing to show off a high quality version of the game that is representative of the final product. I chose level 7 due to the fact that at this point in the game the player has control of all four dimensions for the first time. I wanted to show off how combining the dimensions and your abilities in each one can make for interesting and challenging gameplay and therefore a later level was the obvious choice. It also gave me the opportunity to show how challenging the game can be. I aimed for around 10 – 15 minutes gameplay, this could be longer if the player aims to collect all of the collectibles.



Here is the rough paper design I drew up to present to the rest of the team. I believe the design is fairly simple yet is an effective way of demonstrating the unique style of platforming we want to offer to the player. The player will have to mould themselves and the environment around themselves as they move through obstacles. Changing their properties and abilities as they do so. The player will also have to be fast and combine their abilities effectively.

It works nicely on paper but it will be interesting to see how it works in unity. Hopefully it will work well!

That's it for now!

Trying to be Productive in Production

So, things have been slow since the end of pre-production. After we presented everything we had done to the group, we decided to take a well deserved break from Dimension Hop. It coincided nicely with a 2 week break from lectures and it was nice to distance myself from the stress I;d been suffering from documenting and planning every aspect of the game. It was actually the first time since the beginning of the project that I had actually stopped thinking about it. It was strange.

However, we're all back to work now and in full swing working towards our next deadlines. My initial task was to design a level for the Vertical Slice (A small playable section of the game that shows the progress of all areas and should represent something close to the finished version). The dimensions available to Hop are slowly introduced to the player over the 10 levels of the game. I decided to go for one of the later levels in the game as I wanted to use all four dimensions. With it being a later level I also had to make it difficult. I think I managed to achieve this with the design I showed the team on Wednesday. The feedback from Phil and Simon was positive and I can't wait to see them knock it up in 2D Toolkit. I'll upload a picture of the design in my next blog post.

My other task is to work on writing the narration with Phil, we've been procrastinating slightly with this but what we have written so far is pretty good. Making it wittier and slightly more mature is the key to making it work. I've never tried my hand at this style of writing before but I think we can make something enjoyable.

With the Vertical Slice design out of the way I'm gonna crack on with a few more of the levels for when the guys are ready to start building them. Hopefully I'll put myself and the rest of the team into a good position for the next milestone.

That's all for now!