In the first weeks of our group project we have come up with Prison Chores. This is a party game that lets you control a prisoner to do chores and compete against your friends. We started gathering ideas for the game and soon we had a fun concept.

With the idea being approved we started the prototyping phase. During this phase we'd come up with some questions:

• Is the core mechanic of Prison Chores fun?
• What will the game look like?
• Does the camera viewpoint work for this game?
• Will we use a controller or mouse and keyboard?
• How do we show the difference between the level and the assets you need for scoring and so on.
• Which engine will we use? Unreal Engine or Unity?

During prototyping we found answers for these questions:

• We think that our core mechanic, which is collecting stuff and earning points, is fun because of our other mechanics that'll let you fight the other players etcetera.
• We started creating our art bible this week. We hope to finish it by next week so we can show you some pictures,
• We tested a top down viewpoint but to make this work we needed to adjust the field of view so much eerything became warped. Because of this we changed the camera viewpoint to a 45 degree angle. This way we can remove one of the walls.
  • UPDATE: We tried a third person view and it looked good. We'll have to make a choice in the future.
• With the game being a party game to play with your friends on the couch we chose for a controller. Most people have a console if they play games on a television
• When a player approaches an object that he's able to pick up it will have a glowing effect. When the player is close enough to pick up the object the pick up button will show up.
• We chose Unity because our game is not a big open world game which Unreal Engine is great for. We just don't need the power of that engine.

We haven't encountered many problems to this day. while programming we worked with two pointers to the same memory location instead of using two memory locations. but that's about it.

Apart from that problem everything went great in the programming and art department.

This week we'll hope to finish our art and tech documents so we can start creating more advanced prototypes of Prison Chores. We'll also make a choice between the third person view or the angle viewpoint of the whole level.