Elements of game design, part six: documentation

Documentation – The bane of my life.

Okay Firstly I am really bad at writing things down and writing them well, but sometimes we need to break through and do the devils job and document things. It is an important process, as I mentioned in the planning post. It is part of an important step in organising and planning your work.

So for this entry I will be having a run at a dry version of FMP.

Influence from journey.

The idea for my FMP is to create a playable level or two based around dreams and surrealism.  I want the level to be influenced by known fantasy movies, mixture of an oriental animation, (Aww yiss fox cat girl. Mike loves cat girls. ) and my own dreams that I have written down. I want it to be highly stylized and make great use of hand painted textures. The purpose of this is to portray character making skills as well as stable environment work supported by knowledge of basic scripting. I do now want to give myself too big of the job so this will probably need much bigger amount of planning, scaling down and so on, but if I want to be ambitious this would be what I would produce, roughly , together witch technical requirements:

• Lead Character – Summer Fox girl

- Polygon budget: 15,000,000 polygons – 30,000,000 tris
- Texture Budget: 2x Diffuse, Normal, Colour Specular, Cavity maps 1024x1024
- A skeleton of max 46 bones. (tail +ears requiring additional bones)

• Environment – Large Map based on looks of imaginary sanctuary

- Around 3 terrain textures 512x512 – Diffuse and Normal map

- 3 Types of decal textures 512x512 – Diffuse and Normal map

- Foliage 5 different types of grass bushes suitable within the given theme

• Props and scenery objects:

- Hero assets – Main giant tree in middle of level (Honestly I have not thought so much about that)

- Smaller assets – Rocks, flowers, particles etc. – Usually under 5,000 tris with 512x512 texture maps.

 I did not mention this earlier but I still have not decided which engine to use, if the Unreal 4 is available for us to use by then I will give that a go, as I’ve already looked roughly at it and it seems like a great upgrade, if not I may consider the Unity engine as it is light version of commercial engines and it is easily transferable onto other devices (like android), as well as lightly scripted, newbie friendly.

Also I would probably want to make it an action-adventure game experience, as it is my favourite game genre and it offers a lot to play around with.

So this would be my light take on the FMP, as you can see it is not professional looking, and that is because it’s difficult to make a lot of decisions about the project yet, and things need little cheesy explanations.

However my plan is to produce a professional brief again in September, when I make bigger decision about my skill set, and timing in what I can actually make in that space of time.