Saturday, May 28, 2011

Since today marks the beginning of my summer vacation, I have taken most of my time and have dedicated it towards some well deserved rest. However, I have still gotten around to contributing a little bit more work to "Aldea Lenta," most of which is simply concept art and world structuring. While I do not believe that stories are particularly important to games, I am adding a rather basic one to "Aldea Lenta" in order to simply push the player along on their journey and to provide more context to what they are doing and where they are going. Playing around with the story for a bit in my mind, I think that I now have something quite suitable. One of my main goals now is to put down on paper as soon as possible.

So the fruit of my labor today is an extremely foundational piece of concept art that establishes the "place" of "Aldea Lenta." The game takes place inside a remote ship yard on the gas planet Clonox III. The large ship constructing facility is quite thought out; not a single piece of the design is wasted or pointless. It has been thousands of years since humans had been to Clonox III, so the facility is self-sustaining, taking energy from the depths of the planet in order to power its hordes of slaving androids who put together immense galactic freighters that are sent off to civilization for use.

Part of the concept includes the cooperation behind this complex operation; CAPE Manufactoring. For now, at least, I am going to avoid the typical science fiction tropes regarding large cooperations and leave CAPE simply as a background entity who's sole purpose is to establish the reason why the main character exists in the first place. They are protrayed neither as good or evil; they simply manufactor stuff. And like all larger than life manufactors in fiction, CAPE has a logo that I can use to brand the more mundane objects that will be found within the game adding more detail.

The most important thing I have accomplished by laying out the location of the game in detail is that I have limited the scope of the game to a reasonable scale that can not get too out of control at this point, unless I feel the need to add more locations and places for the player to visit (which honestly, from a time stand point, I cannot). When creating games my greatest weakness, and many others' as well, is an unreasonable ambition that lets projects grow too huge. My proof is the thirty something games I had started to create that soon became too much for me to handle.

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