Welcome to the first Decoy developer diary entry, courtesy of 44 Gone.
Who’s doing what, now?
We are a team of 19 game dev students in the last stage of our 2nd year at the University of Skövde, Sweden. Our last course this term consists of making a video game in 10 weeks. We now find ourselves more than halfway through our allotted time, and would like to tell you what we have been working on.
Decoy is an action platformer game set roughly a century from now. We’ve defined the genre as sci-fi, First-Person Action (think FPS without the S - no shooting, but still plenty of adrenaline). What makes our game a bit unusual is our primary target audience, namely players with little or no experience of FPS/A games.
As a player, you take on the role of Maricruz, our protagonist. Your task is to escape a not-so-abandoned industrial complex once run by Prospect Biotech, while avoiding the gaze of turrets trying to shoot you down. The only tool available to you is an experimental device which teleports you a short distance (a ‘blink’) and leaves behind a statuesque copy of yourself. A turret cannot tell the difference - having locked on, it will fire at the decoy before searching anew, giving you time to escape the turret’s red-lit field of view.
Level concept
Our focus during the first weeks of this project has been on the opening section of the game and nailing down the feeling we want to convey to future players. The various disciplines have had obstacles to handle and different tasks to finish, some intertwining. There have been (oh so many) meetings regarding features, and how they should be executed. The importance of every team member having the same vision for the game cannot be understated. This means that research, common sources of inspiration, and communication are key - the latter of which has failed at times. So we sigh, and we learn, and we improve.
The team consists of four artists (2D, 3D and animators), four programmers, three designers (level/gameplay/mechanics), three narrative designers (ND, story/characters), two sound engineers, and two musicians. One of our designers doubles as our Creative Director, and one of the NDs is far too busy with being our stalwart Project Manager to spare time for storytelling. Such is the life of management.
Next week we will post another article going more in-depth about the game and the different aspects of the game. For more updates about the game visit our facebook page Decoythegame.
