Studio 1 - Weekly Progress - Week 9 HH

By Harry Hughes

I had a fairly quiet week by my standards because I was dealing with some health issues. I badly injured my neck and shoulder which meant it was nigh on impossible to sit at my desk, and also was suffering from exhaustion which resulted in me passing out on one day. Not good. This all gave me a good amount of time to think about what I was wanting to do; handy because I still hadn’t locked in a plan for my Folio 2, and didn’t have the energy to start working away anyway.

Still thinking about making a kind of game set at a music festival but lacking an exciting core concept, I decided I would just build a festival environment and a few stages, hoping that by being able to experience the game a great idea might just show up. I started learning a bit about building terrains and water in Unity and actually came up with a map that almost resembles Skyrim. This reminded me of a town in Scotland I’ve visited a few times that I want to use as a setting for a bigger film/ game project. That particular project is something I want to spend months working on properly, but I thought, hey, why don’t I use that town for now as the setting for my music festival game, and make that my Folio 2 project, possibly as a precursor to a larger project. So that’s my idea.

I don’t want to use the town’s real name, so in my project it’s called Seaforth. I reckon the only sorts of music festivals that small country towns host are folk festivals, so I want this game to be Seaforth Folk Festival.

I know I don’t have heaps of time to make a really great game, but I think I now just need to start building the map- which I think will be a cute coastal town surrounded by mountains, and a big football-oval sized area where the festival will take place. I have tons to learn about world building, but I want to focus on this as I think this project will be more of a world-explorer than a game with like interesting mechanics. I should also think of a sequence of events for the character, something along the lines of: you are the festival organizer and you have to go find the key so that the bands’ trucks can enter the festival grounds through a locked gate. I guess for now I’m more interested in the superficial elements of the game.