all the way back in this post here i mentioned very briefly me and my teams concept for entering the dare to be digital competition.

me and my good friend fabiene created a team with us and 3 other people to enter.

we didn’t get in sadly, so instead i split from my group and took part in the dacii project instead which has actually been a lot of fun, going to have another post about it shortly.

but before i completely forget about the dare projects existence i`m going to blog about the development we put into it up until our rejection letter.

Feedback from the judges:

Worried the team might not have enough experience.
Otherwise nice team composition.

very generic, there are too many games just like this

milestones look achievable and well structured

well balanced team

Market potential within indie channel is concerning, and the game mechanic does nothing for me personally

The concept seems very code-heavy and would be a stretch for just 2 programmer

The concept is interesting and we like the co-op possibilities.

The art style seems a little mixed between serious and cartoony.
Target audience suggests the latter should be the direction but the platform suggests the audience should be older. It’s a little confused currently.

the programmers raged a bit at the feedback :L they were adamant they could handle the code aspects. it wasn’t the end of the world for since thankfully i had the dacii project as a backup.

so our game in question, was intended to be a action/adventure game. where you guide an ameboid through a human body and solve environmental puzzles and defeat virus`s.

we wanted to develop in XNA and intended there to be simple controls and a strong focus on multiplayer cooperation. you would in theory use a 360 pad to move with the left stick,and aim/shoot your goo trail with the right stick to attach to objects and pull,drag, and slingshot things.

here are some animated storyboards which should give you a preview of what we had in mind.

click to view the animation

so in this sequence, the play has moved along a hallway and can see a specific DNA strain in the background. and there is a incomplete one in the path further ahead. picking up the correct gene and placing it in the strain should solve the puzzle and reward the player.

some environment concepts. was great fun doing research into DNA, cells, organs and whatnot. personally a big influence for me was penta tentacles i happened to be playing it at the time and loved the aesthetics and floaty movement. of course the same could be said for flow, a game which is also quite similar.

concepts for plant objects. red a lot into underwater plant life for this.

click to view the animation

a 2 player puzzle, they need to pull the mass to help each other get through.

clicky. another animation.

pretty much the same puzzle but presented in a different fashion. i imagined these objects being bones but the group leader was adamant i not design bones because the ameboids are at a cellular level. i blam that in favour of abstracism! grr!

animation. click.

concept for boss fight gameplay, iterated into a final submission image as you will see below.

animated. click to see the various states of image iteration.

this piece went through a lot of revision before our group leader deemed it worthy for dare submission, i`m grateful for the incentive however as I ended up with a really slick piece of concept art. in this image there are 4 players trying to defeat the boss (based off the HIV virus, frightening isn’t it) the purple player has taken damage and that`s why there is only two white cells inside it, then the three that everyone else has, it`s a health indicator. the yellow player is slingshotting the boss`s projectiles back at him with the help of the green player.

animation. you know what to do by now.

another concept, throwing stuff around to break stuff in age old video game fashion. the slingshot mechanic was a favorite of mine as it really enforced cooperation for destructive payoffs.

before we decided the have players control blobs of good we threw around the idea of a micro nano probe of sorts going into the human body to kill diseases.

animation.

this was the second image we used for our dare submission. in this image the two players are spinning a white blood cell generator to bring about a tidal wave of red blood to destroy the blood clot, the players would need to stick to the walls in order not to be flushed away. now that is a kick ass set piece!

and that`s it. every asset and concept from the `Ameboids` project.

maybe i`ll get to revisit it in the future with fabienes help, perhaps we could iterate it further and incorporate feedback from the dare team to try to qualify next summer.

however, unless we develop it for the ipad or use kinect controls I very much doubt it.