Pre-Production and Getting Started

Hey guys,

So this week we finalized our group. It’s official, Team Overlord now has six members. In addition to the members we mentioned last post, we’ve also added Gordon Tan, our group’s third programmer. So this semester, Team Overlord has already reached a few “team firsts”, for the first time we have six members and we have not one, not two, but three dedicated programmers. We’re excited about the things our team will be able to accomplish this semester.

So our final group will be:

Gary Ng: Game Director, Lead Programmer and Gameplay Programmer

Branan Sarveswaren: Art Director, Lead 3D Artist and 2D Artist

Rachel Fung: Lead 2D Artist and 3D Artist

Mackenzie Sturrup: Particle Programmer and Audio

Alexander Best: Technical Programmer and 3D Artist

Gordon Tan: Gameplay Programmer and Engine/Framework Programmer

A (rough) world map concept created by Gary.

Aside from finalizing our team, we also had a lengthy discussion on the design of our game. We haven’t finalized everything yet, we’re going to do that the next team meeting, but we’ve already decided that we will be redesigning SHFT into a third person RPG. We felt that with our new team we would be able to express ourselves much better in an RPG than an RTS, so we will be doing that instead. Since SHFT already had a first person view, we can merely just rip out the RTS elements of the game and re-design it around a third person view pretty easily.

We still don’t have a set story or world designed yet, but we’re most likely going to once again use Jack and document his adventures through Fantasyland. We plan on fleshing out Fantasyland a lot to make it a legitimate world. We had text  based descriptions of it in Portal Puffs and we had a brief graphical view of it in SHFT and we plan on expanding it to include a variety of areas.

As far as game play goes, we want our game to be extremely epic. We plan on having a ton of abilities that the player can use and a ton of enemies that you will be able to face too. We want this game to have as much content as possible. We’re aiming for at least an hour of legitamate content. It’s a pretty ambitious goal, but it’s definitely doable.

We also had a pretty lengthy discussion on whether or not we wanted to include a gunblade in our game this time around. We had one in SHFT but a few of our members advocate against it for a variety of reasons whereas one of our members really wants to put it in. You may have heard us arguing about it during our meeting last Monday. The decision isn’t final yet, but we’ll let you know!

Looks pretty good, but are we using it again????? Edit: "NOPE" - Branan -

After this Monday’s meeting, we’ll likely have the core design of our game finalized and we’ll be entering production. Hypehypehype.

Gary