4 Week Project - An ...Interesting Start

Hi! It's been a little while since my previous post, and there are several reasons for that. Read on for a look into what's been happening over the first few weeks of the MA

For my 4 week project, I decided to get to work on a fairly brief version of what I intended to do for my main project, conceptualising a 2D version of a popular 3D game, so I could also get my tutors opinions on that idea. I decided to go with the original Resident Evil, as I already had an idea of how to change it. I got to work in Powerpoint and started creating what would be a fairly short document discussing the original game, identifying its key features, and talking about how I believed the best way to make a 2D version would be to make a survival horror point-and-click puzzle game. 

After getting some of my main points down the time came to show my tutors what I'd been getting on with. Jim seemed to like the idea but thought it'd be quite a lot of work, suggesting that for this shorter project I take a look into some popular 2D games to see what people like about them in order to gain some insight into the current state of 2D games in the industry. I was fine with this idea, as I thought it would be some useful research.

Initially I had a little trouble figuring out my angle, as I wanted whatever I produced to lead on to my main project idea. I started out trying to justify some opinions I held about the industry but that just lead to cherry-picking articles which wasn't what I wanted to do, so instead I decided to lay out those opinions before looking into a few triple A titles and a few indie titles to see if the facts revealed a different truth.

It was at this point that I became sick with whatever non-COVID illness has been going around, and for some reason it really knocked me out, preventing me from getting much done and even going in to university for a week. Brilliant timing. Luckily the week after that was a reading week, but this didn't bring much change other than both of my fiancée's parents coming down with actual COVID, which didn't really help the stress levels. Essentially with this and also having to get outside of university work done, for a good two weeks I've been struggling a little, but at the point of writing this I'm getting back into the swing of things.

Aside from various illness related problems, I did regret for a little while not choosing a more design based project to take on for this intro to the course, but with a little over a week left I thought it'd be a bad idea to drastically alter the project so instead have committed to making the most out of it, it's early days after all. 

Over the weeks I spent mostly thinking, I did realise that what interests me a lot about modern 2D games, particularly but not necessarily limited to indie titles, is that their design can be informed by what has been learned from a good couple of decades of 3D game development, whereas classic 2D games didn't have that insight. The most recent 2D Mario title - New Super Mario Bros. U (and Deluxe) - was criticised for being a pretty samey game as all the previous ones, and I got to wondering if this has anything to do with the fact that the groundwork of the game has remained fairly identical to the original Super Mario Bros from the 80s. Even so, I'm sure that in the level designs there will be evidence of ideas that in some form only came to light in the advent of 3D games.

I think that this is a good angle to take when thinking about my main project - what better way to investigate how insight gained from 3D game design can influence the design of 2D games than attempting to convert 3D games to 2D whilst attempting to retain the soul of the original, especially games in which the 3D aspect is so crucial. I want to choose games with no (official) 2D entries/equivalents, so I don't have any official 2D framework to base my ideas off of. I intend to analyse how, in the games I choose, being in 3D influences design decisions of all kinds in order to create a 2D reflection of the original, if you get me. That's all if I'm able to actually do this project, but we'll see what happens, as I said before, it's early days.

For now I need to be getting on with my intro project. I think I'm going to carry on with it a bit more before fully posting about it on here - since my time was wasted by being sick I don't want to interrupt my flow too much by making too many blog posts. This one is just a little update.

See you in the next one!

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