Second Meeting, Nov 1st, week 1

We decided at the end of the first meeting to meet again two days later.

During this meeting, we discussed game ideas some more, and I took notes again.

This time, we had a few more versions of games:

• Still the space strategy game
• But also a space puzzle game
• And a clone platform game, where f. ex. you'd need to jump over a gap, create pile of dead clones to do it!

After discussing some we needed to make some decisions so that we could focus our efforts and ideas, meaning we chose some ideas and excluded others.

• We would not make a 2D game
• We chose the clone puzzle platform, with different types of clones doing different things when they die. Mostly because we all liked that idea best, and it had an interesting story, that Alex had concocted!

This is the first bricks of the first of the four pillars that we are required to have for this course project, the Game Concept.

Another pillar is the Technical Platforms:

• We've decided to make a 2D game, and we will use Box2D and LibGdx for this, and develop in Java (which is a language all six of us know).
• We discussed what platforms we'd like to develop for, and decided on PC and Android

The third pillar is the Business Plan, which we discussed shortly, saying that we would release the game on steam and google play.

The last pillar is the Target Group.

Here we talked about clones playing such a big role in the game might make it less suitable for young children, maybe 12+ would be a good age.

We also determined that the the target groups for PC and android might be very different. On android the players might be younger and older, while on PC the players wold be "our age", and these groups might have different motivations to play the game. You usually spend less time per game on the phone than on the computer for example.

At this point, we ran into an interesting discussion:

Everyone can play the game, but should we develop for everyone?

I have just started my master in Interactive Media Technology, and started learning in more detail about target groups and UX and such. So I had just learned that it can be very hard to develop for "everyone". As I've understood it, it's easier to make decisions when the intended target group is smaller, even if, in the end a larger group might use the product.

But not all my group members agreed, since the game would work the same for PC as for android, we just needed to think about the way to control the game would work for android too.

We discussed a bit, but then we decided to ask Björn, the course teacher for input and how we should think about this.

Before the meeting I had created a timeline. During the meeting I insisted that we discussed what was realistic to have finished when, to get a first version of a time plan to follow. In it we have planned activities, a few milestones for the game, for the GDD, as well as deadlines from the course. Later on I also added the dates for the various presentations.