Friday, March 4, 2011

Pepperidge Farm Remembers (blog 9a)

I’m going to be quite honest here, my group and I didn’t really put our best effort into this presentation and I’m sure it showed. We got together on Tuesday, put forth all of our ideas that most of us didn’t really think about in the first place, picked one, and then decided to just roll with whatever came out of our heads on Thursday night. We probably spent a total of two or maybe three hours on this project total, which is probably the bare minimum of time spent compared to previous projects work duration. You can’t really blame us though, it was just a power point and most of the group members weren’t digital media majors. Also I’m pretty positive that most of the class has been so creatively drained over the past nine weeks that our next project would probably ironically be the most bland, drab thing we’ve ever made.
Anyway, this is way off topic; let’s get on track. Our game was based on a really cool story that we surprisingly neglected to express during our presentation. We had discussed and based everything in the presentation off of this story, yet we never actually told the foundation of all of the game’s features and qualities. The game, The Gestalt Principal, was made to scare the living daylights out of anyone who played it. The story begins as you wake up in a room, unaware of your surroundings, probably because it is so dark and your vision is extremely blurred. Sounds you hear and barely backlit silhouettes that you see indicate that you are in some sort of tropical forested area. Throughout the game you are to find your way out, learn of your surroundings, and find out why and how you ended up in this situation. If you somehow survive amongst all of the crazed, flesh-hungry monsters, maintain your sanity and your constantly wavering health, and find the glass wall at the edge of this realm you’ve come to realize has been your home for several months, you finally find the truth behind this nightmare: that you were somehow captured and placed inside of a giant glass bubble as the subject of a test for highly classified scientific research. How do you get out? Well. That would be a good place to cut off so that you can buy the next game. The Gestalt Principal: Vote for Hilary, where the second half of your character’s story is revealed.
A huge chunk of what was in the paragraph that you just read was not included within our presentation. We didn’t mention the glass bubble, we didn’t mention the scientific experiment, and we didn’t give the character any personality or connect it to the audience very well. We did however explain in very great detail everything that wasn’t part of the story, but rather the gameplay and how the game felt and looked overall. This is something we did very well by explaining the physics of the game (mechanics), the general goals and objectives of the game, the movement as well as the perspective of the game, the system on which the game would be played, how the controller layouts would look, how the interface would look as well as help the player understand his surroundings and current situation (health meters, mini maps, etc.), we defined various simple, yet mandatory rules of the game, and we went through an eclectic collection of different visual and audible guides that are placed throughout the game.

Overall I think our presentation wasn’t bad, but it could have been a lot better. We didn’t prepare who was going to say what either… So that was a mistake.

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