“The Great Deep Blue” is a game development project within the Oulu Game Lab, a training facility for game development at the Oulu University of Applied Sciences.
At the start of the training program, there were 15 game ideas, of which 9 got through after the high level concept was pitched to a panel of judges. Further work was done on the game design document and business and marketing plan. Now there are 5 after the second pitching round. The Great Deep Blue is one of them.
The Great Deep Blue is a multiplayer RTS game for PC, set in a dystopian future where the land has been covered in water and people are struggling to survive on fish and scrap. So, what’s different from all the other RTS games out there? As the game world is floating on water, the currents in the water move the player’s and his opponent’s base and fleet. This presents a new kind of challenge for the tactics, as the player has to take into account the forces of nature when battling for the victory.
Our next goal is to have a playable demo by 11th of December 2015, when the demos of the games will be presented during a party in the Oulu Game Lab premises. Our aim is to have a simplified version of the game, which demos the game mechanic in a multiplayer environment. If the judges are pleased with our creation, the game will go into production and will be released around Q3/2016.
We’ll be using our IndieDB page to blog about our game development progress, and the experience itself of what it's like to work on a game in an environment that could be described as a "several month long game jam with people you've only just met". The experience thus far has been very educational, as we’ve been put through the grinder a couple of times and there’s the constant pressure of producing something of value with a group of people who are all still learning.
In the next article, I’ll be shedding more light onto the game itself, the style and it’s mechanics.
If you have any questions or comments about the game, the process of how it’s being made or about Oulu Game Lab, please do contact us!
You can find our project also on Twitter and on Facebook, where we'll also be introducing our team members.
Until next time,
Armi
The Great Deep Blue
P.S. It is of supreme importance that we'll get some followers, as a lot is at stake: we are in a competition with another team at OGL and the winner will get a bottle of Koskenkorva. If you know anything about the Finnish culture, you'll understand how serious this is.
