Concept Workshop

Today’s discussion is to help you complete the concept document, which is due this week. As we have mentioned in class, the concept document for this course is a little different than the one for 3152. We want you to make a slide presentation that covers the highlights of your game. It should be created as if you were going to do an oral presentation for your game (though you are not doing any oral presentation beyond what you already did for the in-class critiques).

If you are in doubt, the instructions page has a lot of examples for what we are looking for in this document. We suggest that you look at them. But for today’s activity, we suggest that you focus on two things.

Competitive Analysis

At the start of class, Traci will remind you about the competitive analysis, which is one of the more important elements of your concept document. In 3152, the discussion about the competition was very minimal. However, if you are planning on a commercial release or submitting to a festival, it is something that you need to take more seriously. Traci has recorded a video about this on the ENGRC Canvas page, which you should watch.

The worksheet above is intended to give you direction for this discussion section. However, we are not expecting you to fill it out and submit it. We are expecting you to integrate your results into the concept document.

Game Mechanics

As we explain in the assignment instructions, this concept document is more of a slide deck than the document from 3152. That means you need to be able to convey things visually with very little text. Spend the class time sketching your game mechanics with no text. Your sketches should include the touch gesture/interface and clearly show how it affects the game state. Consider the following picture from Magic Moving Mansion Mania.

Remember, this sketch does not need to be screenshot-level quality. Most of the example documents you see are final drafts, after the game is done. For now, stick figures and squiggles are fine.

But the real challenge is this: can you understand what is going on in the sketch without much text? This activity is a good time to confer with other groups in the section. You can do this by jumping over to their playtesting channel. Show them your sketch. What do they see? What confuses them? How can you improve your sketch to make it more clear?