Solidified Idea

I'm just curious I've been reading loads and loads of the paragraphs that we've provided for ourselves in ideas. But they all seem to be questions and uncertainty, but nothing really completely solid without-a-doubt shot down to what we want to show off in a game demo project. EDIT: Just wanting to find out if we have any summary of what type of game we're going to make in a few short sentences describing the scene and a few others describing the action. Sorry if I'm being really picky
EDIT: Today January 04, 2008 We've decided on UT Engine and to make the Graveyard game about lesser demons with quest objectives to retrieve objects to bring to a certain point on the level to summon a boss-like monster and is a 4/8/16 player co-op game about tossing objects or eachother as weapons or placeholders to help achieve quests. If any changes please say immediately! to the general idea that is.
As for a game name... its undecided....

You are being picky, but that's okay for now because in all honesty, no-one is really sure right now. Currently we have "the safe bet", which would be the graveyard game. Here's a quick synopsis of that one...
Pick from one of a few different monster types, each with different strengths and weaknesses, as you run around a spooky graveyard collecting ancient relics in order to summon a powerful demon. But not everyone gets to win, as the player who throw in the last of the nine necessary relics wins the reward of spreme demonic powers! Using tombstones, flowerpots, rocks, ancient scrolls and tomes, (as well as the occasional distracted wildlife) players will have to dash around the graveyard collecting objects, dodging attacks and smacking the crap outta each other in their desperate bid to be monster master! BUT! In order to acquire all nine relics, they'll have to work together to unlock key areas and get to hard-to-reach locations! The race is on to discover who has what it takes to be top monster!

And that's the safe bet. It's nothing new, it's simple, and it shows off our design and art abilities fairly evenly. And hopefully, it works well with the Unreal engine. It's currently the most "tangible" idea at the moment, but it's not innovative, and there's the chance it may come off as just Unreal Tournament with goofy monsters and throwing stuff instead of shooting. I've talked to a few teachers about it and for the most part they love the idea, and personally I'm all for it.
But don't get the wrong impression about what we're doing. We're not being "wishy-washy" or half-assed about the ideas or the design, we're just trying to respect everyone's interests by giving everyone else a fair chance to pipe-in with their own ideas. The last thing me and Aidan want to do is cram this "Monster Mayhem" stuff down everyone's throats. So thar ya go. I hope that answered at least some of your questions.

All right thanks heh, that answered about almost all my concerns. Yes yes I know we're trying to respect everyone's wishes and we're not trying to be wishy-washy I was just worried if we had any base ground we sort of agreed on to kind of work on.

I'm personally not a huge fan of the graveyard idea. I don't have anything against it and it does sound pretty fun, but given the choice I'd prefer to do something different. The problem is that idea is fairly fleshed out and nothing else is. On the last day of low-poly I had a conversation with Vaughn and Aidan that resulted in a pretty cool idea, check out my post in the "Where we're at so far" thread on the Design forum.

I am not going to be a stick in the mud on the graveyard thing, but I don't want to just shut up and pretend I love it. It sounds like it would be fun to play and it sounds like we could make it pretty much exactly how it's been envisioned, but it seems almost too safe in a way.

Yeah Max is right on there. We don't really have anything nailed down right now for a few reasons, one is definitely because we want everyone to have the chance to throw their two cents onto the table, but also because we want to let as many ideas come into play as we can. If we make too many decisions now, and start setting stuff in stone then someone has a brilliant idea later we'd have to pull a full 180 and all the work would go to waste, we should give everyone time to have their great ideas and bring them to the table then start making real solid decisions in time.

When class starts we'll all be together and then we can start hammering out the "for sure" details.

Max is right about the graveyard game, it's solid, but it's a "safe" bet. It could be a whole lot of fun if we make sure it plays tight. BUT it's not innovative at all, it doesn't bring anything new to the table, and I agree with Adam I think we have some other interesting ideas we should explore before we settle on the "safe" bet.

I think something important we need to think about is what Unreal does well and how we can use it for our game ideas. If we hang on to Unreal's core gameplay and things we know it can do, that will take a load off of our progammers, who we don't really know the extent of their capabilities just yet.

Alright, sounds good. Oh and well since everyone has their own puddle of things they don't like, I myself don't really mind doing anything we propose so I'll go with anything the majority likes to do. Only thing I don't like is if we're lost haha but it doesn't seem like it... do we know who the other team of programmers we're grouped up with..? I think there was 2 groups right. Not really wanting to group with.. er.. yeah.. the solo project one... but oh well

Think we can get together within the first week and discuss this stuff? I'm feeling a little worried on getting an idea down heh.. just my concerns though.

Oh yeah for sure dude, no worries.

Our first GPW class is tomorow afternoon, so I think we'll be given that class to start making the hard descisions, but if we don't get as much decided as we'd like, I'm all for meeting up again this week to get as much done in that respect as possible.