Chapter 1 - The Head of the Snake

​Back in June of 2014 I visited Champlain for the first time and heard of the tales of a class called Capstone, and how it emulated a game studio in form and function. Now this past week this big “scary” class finally began. Just like any RPG however my team and I are well equipped with swords, armor and potions. On top of that we also have gained all of the experience we need to be at the right level for the class.

Over the summer we were communicating about different ideas, while none of them really were too interesting for the entire team we did have a few mechanics that stuck out here and there. Nothing was ever entirely solid. Once we got back to campus we had a meeting to nail down our top three ideas, but we weren’t really sold on anything quite yet.

The Three Ideas Consisted of:

​Codename: Florida Man - Inspired after an article I read about a Florida man getting arrested because he brought a gator into a supermarket and claimed it was his “Pet”. This concept was originally based around one player becoming Florida man in the middle of a game and the rest have to find out who is Florida man.

Bastard Captain - This idea was based around the rule that a Captain is the last one to leave a ship, but our Captain is greedy and knows the ship is going to crash and he wants to be off first. It would involve the Captain sneaking around the ship to collect objects for his escape. We originally started with a Groundhog Day type of idea for this then someone brought up a few years back when that cruise ship crashed in Europe (the coast of Italy if I remember correctly), and the Captain was one of the first ones off of the boat.

How Candy Destroyed the World - From the first day of forming teams we always wanted to do a game with old school 3D platformer elements. For the concept of this game you play as a Child on Halloween that has a plot for world domination that requires copious amounts of candy to execute. The Child would find and befriend the Spirits of Halloween who will grant them powers to explore more of the world.​

Little did we know that not only would we want to go for Florida Man, but the concept would entirely change in the span of a day because of one Mechanic.

Fluid Gameplay

That’s right you play as a Liquid! (Just kidding that was a dumb joke.)

Essentially we have roles that the players get to use. Each of these roles have multiple tasks to accomplish that either assists or hurts another role in the game. After a set amount of time all players switch roles. Every player will play every role in a match, and how well each player did overall will help determines who wins. On top of the fluid gameplay all of this madness takes place on a beautiful island resort where everyone comes to find their happiness - but everyone’s idea of happiness is very different.

Dustin (Our wonderful Lead Programmer and actual Wizard) and I recently held a meeting about Systems and Mechanics for the game. We already have a ton going for this concept, which is awesome! Even though it hasn’t been approved just quite yet our team knows that this is the concept that we want to roll with, so us two decided (in our usual breakneck workflow pace) to start prototyping and documentation for this game concept. Dustin has started on the basic systems, a chat log (for QA cheats, in game manipulation, and talking crap to each other while playing), and networking! I have just recently begun our master role document, which will essentially be the game’s web of interactions. It will lay out all of the roles, their tasks, and what roles each task interacts with. ​

I then met with Cody (Our Producer commonly referred to as “Father”) and we planned out our tasks on Pineapple (Champlain’s Redmine) so that we could make sure our documentation and taskboards can keep up with the workflow that we plan to have.

It has been an incredibly productive week so far for Ouroboros Creations, and I can’t wait to see what this semester has in store for us!