Friday, November 13, 2015

Computer Games

What we have done: Since we changed our focus completely (from using computer games as a teaching tool in schools, to computer games based on reality) this week has been dedicated to research about the topic. The reason we changed the topic was because we had trouble moving forward on our previous concept, we felt like the ideas we had was not that fun and there were a lot of problems that we got stuck on. We all felt like computer games based on reality was a much more fun topic.

We are sure to stick with the Chernobyl disasters as the story. We found some really cool documentaries that we could be inspired by when developing our concept. We have also thought about the concept more deeply, how the game would actually look like and ways of presenting it at the final presentation. We decided it might be a good idea to use print screens from other games, documentaries and also producing small comics that illustrates our ideas. We thought that one long movie to illustrate our game might not be suitable because it is very hard to know how to structure such a video.

A background check has been done to find out what games based on reality there are out there. We found some but they are often based on violence (for example war games). We feel like we could make a game based on reality where the personal story and storytelling is in focus rather than just make the excitement based on violence.

While the game is based on reality it is necessary to use some fiction in it when developing the main plot and the characters. The plot, environment and characters will be inspired by real data that we gathered to make the game trustworthy and believable as a medium to tell a real story for everyone. This is a challenge for us. How can we tell the real story while still having the option of choice? We feel like we want to develop a game where there are choices because we feel like a game without choices might as well be a movie.  We thought about a game where your decisions in the game leads to different scenarios but the outcome is more or less the same, because there is only so much you can do to influence the outcome.

What we will do: We have to decide what material we want to base the concept on. We also have some gathering of information left. We are investigating a game called Stalker where we hope to be able to gather information such as print screens that might be suitable for illustrating our own game concept. We are also gathering information and pictures from Chernobyl before the event, which seems to be somewhat hard to find. Next Tuesday we plan on consulting Björn Thuresson to get some feedback on our ideas. The plot of the game i not yet done and that is one thing we have to work out in detail. Then we have to figure out how to present our ideas.

The main challenges for us seems to be to visualize how a presentation would look like where it is understandable what we are doing as well as exiting. There is also a lot of work left on working out our concepts in detail.

Right now we feel like we are progressing and we feel like we have what it takes to move further 

Resources.  Fortunately there are a lot of great documentaries about the Chernobyl disaster that we can use for inspiration. We feel like it could be great to base a story upon a documentary since where are a lot of visual feedback that we then could use for illustration of our concept. Examples of some great documentaries that we found:

Chernobyl Uncensored documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS3WvKKSpKI
Surviving Disaster documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njTQaUCk4KY

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