Boo! Development Blog Wk1

Ideas are nothing special, ideas are cheap and worthless and found littering the streets, in your kitchen and even lining your bed.  However what happens to turn those ideas into products is interesting, amazing, time consuming and boring all at the same time.  If you have been involved in any project from building shelves for your home to producing a multimillion AAA game you would be familiar with this concept.  However when it's not your daily job to do that, the task becomes a lot harder.  Welcome to Game Pride :)

GP was started as a dev group in university with Paul, Geoff and Myself, since then Paul and I have continued to design concepts, build the team, shrink the team, develop games and do all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff.  Our primary aim is to create develop and learn, as such the GP roster is a rotating door between the various projects and configurations we have had over the past few years.  But one fact remains, we have fun :)

So a couple of weeks ago one of my members comes forward and states that she would like us to consider preparing a game for the Independent Games Festival.  So at the next weekly meeting we sat down and discussed the idea.  Having already finished a prototype a month or so earlier we could move forward with the idea preparing it for submission.  Our concerns were as such, do we have enough people to pull this off in two months and should we be using a competition as a deadline?  Unfortunately (or fortunately) both Michael and John, our programmers, have been laid off so we have a little time to work with.  There's some other considerations there but I will not go into them at this stage.

As such, our current makeup

John - Lead Programmer
Michael - Programmer
Chris - Programmer

Wez - Designer
Jess - Concept Artist
Paul - Modeller and Animator

Georgia - Producer
Jon - Lead Producer

This is obviously not enough, especially with John going to Italy for August.  But as a team we decided it was possible and we should go for it, with a reassessment milestone in a month's time and the product due early october.  We sat down and divvied up the tasks for the next week and then discussed what would make Boo! a game worthy of the IGF.  Now for us at the moment all we can really angle at is quality of design, audience and overall, visual art and sound are dependent on who I pull together and the other two, while we have awesome programmers we're using Unity3d and we need to implement, not innovate (but if we happen to, that's awesome too).

So i'm on the phone, sending emails and assembling people.  seeing what we can pull together.  And I asked my crew a important question, what are some types of challenge that fit well within our scope?