So, as you all probably know by now, or maybe you don’t, I’m a part of the newly-formed Rivet Games (we have twitter as of today! @rivet_games) and I’m taking part in the Critical Hit collaboratory that’s going on in the TAG space at Concordia this summer. You might also know that Charlotte and Andy, the rest of my team, weren’t really around for the first two weeks of the 10-week incubator because they were finishing up another contract. Well, this week was their first week with me and wow did things ever start to move around here!

We’ve made ourselves a schedule and so far we’re ahead of it, so that’s great news. We’re doing our first character models and prototyping the mechanics. On my end, I’ve been redrawing all of those ideograms via tablet this week and I’m now onto storyboarding. Our main issues are that even with all this great progress, ten weeks isn’t all that much, and that we still haven’t quite found the perfect gameplay for all the sections of our game – in particular, we’re searching for ways to introduce the stereotype objects in a more seamless way, and we’re also trying to liven up the gameplay between the block puzzles – we do know that we’re going to have a zombie reaction system, but we’re not sure what else the player should be doing at that point. We’re toying with the idea of maybe consolidating the puzzle section and the zombie reaction section in some way. We’re hoping that we’ll be inspired while we’re prototyping but we also have to be aware of how much time we have. We need to control our scale.

Our aim right now is to create a first “vertical slice” that shows just what kind of game this is and how the mechanics work.

Well, I’ll leave you with a few pictures of what I’ve been working on since I should get back to it: a few of the “thoughts” of the zombies. These will appear in thought-bubbles above their heads when they react to the player. Try to interpret them?