indie game diaries - brainstorming and concept art

July 29, 2021

indie game diaries - brainstorming and concept art

Hi,

Welcome to my blog where I document all of my frustration with game dev.

I am a computer science graduate trying my best to make a game demo in six months.

I am lost and I don't know what am I doing however, I am learning a lot on the way.

This is my first game dev blog post. my goal is to share my work and get to know other game developers.

so if you are a game developer don't hesitate to write me a comment I love to get to know you.

I started working on this game in June and the main question in my mind was:

Am I supposed to know what I'm doing?.

The whole process is a mess. I had random ideas quashed together creating more mess.

I understand that people start with small ideas and build from them. but all I can think of are random scenes, character design, environment design, feelings I want to convey, and some random events in the storyline.

Important stuff like the gameplay or the main game rules is still a foggy concept in my brain.

I am hoping that the game slowly unfolds itself as I experiment with ideas.

I know I know I am making my process hard and complicated.

I honestly did not care about the gameplay as much as I cared about what type of feeling I wanted the player to experience.

you can say that I want to design an experience. now I don't know how but I'm trying.

Here is the main story :

The game centers around a young girl's journey to find her father. I want the game to illustrate the feeling of abandonment. it starts when the main character sees her father leaving through the house's door. Then she runs to follow him but as she opens the door she sees more doors and behind each door, there are more doors to give the feeling of overwhelming loss and despair.

so I started by designing the main character.

- she is a 10 years old girl.

- Time period: 1960.

- Style: vintage toys.

With that information in mind I started a Pinterest board with a vintage sewing pattern as my reference something like this:

(vintage patterns fandom) (vintage patterns fandom)

(vintage patterns fandom) (vintage patterns fandom)

I tried my best to simplify the shapes while maintaining the same aesthetic.

her whole body is a triangle, also I wanted to turn her into a toy to keep the animation simple and easy for me to make later.

Here is some character exploration.

Then I moved into Blender. Keep in mind I was learning Blender as I was designing my character.

The ugly stage.

The (I don’t know how to model hands stage.)

I don't remember how long it took me to make the hands. but here is another version (I call this the tiny hands' stage)  but at this point, I started noticing how I am simply wasting my time on the details as this took more time than expected.

much much better hands.

And now the animation part after a few days of watching blender rigging tutorials,
and many many rigging files I have a fully rigged and ready-to-animate character.

character_rigging_13 (that's ok I am learning).

I got bored of watching tutorials and I naively thought I could make a running animation
 without watching any tutorial and that’s what happened here.

Finally, after watching some tutorials I have a running and an idle animation.

Then I took some time away from the character to do some environment design.

The (uninspired to work at this game because I have no clear idea how the environment should look like stage)

I made some sketches of the house.

I looked at a lot of photos and I mean a lot of photos of toys only to land nowhere.

(at this point I was uninspired and unmotivated to do anything so this is how the house looked like).

So I am back at the drawing board again this time with a new design.

In this design, you can get a glimpse of the possible gameplay.

how it looks like in 3D.

Trying on different color palettes.

Feeling indecisive (blender cycles render result)

all of these rendered images is to help me establish the final look and feel of the game.

Feeling stuck at this point again so I decided to do more exploration work, This time with an outdoor scene

I started with some tree design ( trying my best to stick to my theme of vintage toys)

I worked directly in Blender hoping to save time.

adding doors and little things.

still exploring.

The final game look and visuals are not that clear to me. I see only a few images in my mind, only pieces of a game but never the full image, and not as clear as I want it to be, so it's time to do more brainstorming.

To think of gameplay I wrote down keywords related to toys.

-Wind up toys.

-Battery.

-Wires.

-Spinning toys.

-Folding and unfolding dollhouse.

-LED light.

-Buttons.

Here is a series of ideas and sketches I did while brainstorming some gameplay ideas.

The first one is of a moving checkered floor, the floor is powered by a battery,

where the player has to move the battery from one room to another to power the floor.

Or move checker pieces to complete a circuit that connects to a battery.

Another idea is to connect a battery to a circuit and the player's job is to change the direction of

the electricity by spinning a piece to activate or deactivate some part of the environment.

The next idea is a memory game where the player pushes some buttons in sequence to open nested doors, each button opens one door and the player must know through trial and error the right sequence to open all the doors if the wrong button was pushed all the doors will close back up.