Yikes! too much on my plate

After countless hours of working on the music game, my team missed the development turn in for the indie game challenge. Unfortunately we all had a lot on our plates and balancing school, work, and a an amazing game took its toll on the whole team. It was a dire situation, however we're not giving up we're still working on the game, and we even have a sequel planned.

Currently my main course is my Final Project, every game development student at Full Sail goes through "Final Project." Its a 5 month game project which focuses on every aspect of the game development process from the initial concept to shipping. I'm excited, especially since I'm the lead designer for my group. My group consists of a bunch of amazing individuals and so far it's been a blast working with them. We still have a lot of communication issues that we need to kneed out, this is due to the fact that we all have amazingly strong and unique personalities.

I would say that I am the feature creep guy. I'm passionate about making this game and I my goal is to make this the best game that has come out of Full Sail. Unfortunately we only have five months, and its been hard because I can come up with an amazing gameplay concept or innovative core but it would be unfeasible for the scope of this project. After a few days of brainstorming my group came up with two ideas. The first one was a third person hack and slash with a satisfying combo system and platforming elements. The second idea was a real time strategy game in where you control a fraternity and you have to recruit different students throughout a college campus, the only problem is that your opponent is trying to do the same thing. You have to use your wits and recruit enough students to take down the opposing fraternity. Did I mention that it's multi-player? The second idea was picked and although the core may seem simple , it is solid. In addition, we're pumping a lot of personality in our game. So far I've created a paper prototype, and a fully working prototype in Warcraft3. After this prototype was created we were able to make the appropriate changes, and pitch new ideas.

I'm still working on my robber board game. I've started a flash game on the side to simulate my definition of love. This is really an experiment in portraying an idea through gameplay. Usually, games have a story which ties into the gameplay, however I want to simply portray an idea through gameplay, I'm still in the prototyping phase but this is partially due to the fact that Im also learning flash while I'm prototyping.

I'm also very enthralled about the release of Unity3D and Unreal for FREE!!!! Its great, and I have to refrain from starting a game, and hopefully I have enough willpower.