Welcome to Capstone

Hi.  I'm Alex Beauchesne (a.k.a. BeauPrime), and this my development blog for my senior Capstone project at Champlain College.  I'll be making weekly updates here on interesting occurrences, technical challenges, and overall team progress.  My team is NeverYear Games, composed of a Lead Engineer (me), two Co-Lead Designers (John Cotto and John Mancino), and a Lead Artist (Michael Taranto).

Week 1: Concepts and Evaluation of Technical Options

This past week, on a team level, was about brainstorming.  Our team has some fairly unique ideas, each with very strong elements.

Our first idea is We Love Nuclear Armageddon, an arcade-style strategy game about interplanetary nuclear war.  It's fast-paced and simple to learn in the grand tradition of the arcade games of old.  This should help broaden our audience beyond the usual strategy game enthusiasts.  We're aiming for about five minutes per mission, which should help sell the game to those who aren't willing to play through one mission in multiple hour-long sessions.  We have a strong "Retro-Future" aesthetic going for this idea as well.  The game is set in the future as seen by 1950's America.  The world is powered by chrome plating and uranium fuel.  The tension resulting from the early years of the Cold War will also factor into our aesthetic and mission designs.  We're floating about a second idea, but it needs a bit more refinement before I'll feel comfortable discussing it on this blog.

From an engineering perspective, this week was about researching our options regarding prototyping and, eventually, full development technology.  I spent a large chunk of time looking into Unity3D.  I used it last semester for Game Production II, but I'm still not sure it's the right choice for development of our ideas.  We're considering utilizing one development platform for prototyping and another for full development next semester (assuming the team survives the big merge at the end of this semester).  In total, I'm looking into Unity3D, Adobe AIR, and MonoGame, since I have experience with all three platforms.  By next week I should have a much stronger idea of our choice of platform.