Week 1:

With the beginning of our first true project week, Art lead Harry decided upon a style to take the project down; a style inspired by the Japanese Animation "Tekkon Kin Kreet":

In further discussion, he also expressed interest in, instead of Tekkon Kin Kreet's traditional anime art approach, adopting a more westernised "Saturday Morning Cartoon" feel to the project, using simple but effective designs and texturing throughout. This was presented during out meeting this Teusday, along with our other ideas.

This meeting (which was the first gathering of all the designers, though due to appaling weather that week none of the Programmers, who are based on another campus, were able to attend the meeting) was a chance for the tutors to come to understand our base ideas and see the direction the project was heading down. We found that with our many ideas, there was none that particularly stood out at the time, so made the decision to each continue developing ideas alone and have another meeting on that Friday. However, we did set out the first set of assingments for members of the group. We decided that we would need to compile an "Frequently Asked Questions" list to hand to the programmers, to help us understand aspects of the Torque engine we would be building the game in, which none of the designers had used (and some, including myself, hadn't even heard of!). I compiled a list of nine starting questions and then handed it over to Hannah, who was acting as liason between us and the programmers. We will be adding more questions to, and removing asnwered ones from, this list as we continue further into the project.

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By Friday's meeting (to which a representative of the programming team was able to attend), we had begun to finalise our concepts. Harry presented to the group his concept of a "wild west-esque" science fiction environment; fictional yet containing several of the symbolisms people would relate to the wild west (such as traditional hats, deserts and stiruped boots). I found myself falling in love with this idea, as i felt it would make a novel and very atmospheric concept that would stand out and appeal to the audience well, as it would likely be starkly different to the general market. It was the first concept we considered for the final, and the group discussion focused on fleshing out the game within that world, based on the specifications outlind in the brief, which called for a three-section level; the approach to the fortress through the seige, arrival at the fortress, and then defence of the fortress from the Tempora seige. Concepts passed between two ideas; a settlement serving as the "fortress", and a train (the latter being suggested as a less cliche'd idea, and inspired somewhat by the infamous great train robbery).

Eventually, we debated combining the ideas to form two possible paths; one where the train is being used by Tempora to invade the settlement (in which case the settlement is the fortress), or one where Tempora are departing the settlement via the train (in which case the train would be the fortress). We considered several possible trains; a steam train, sci-fi train, even an "air train". I put foward the concept of an oversized land train, possibly anti-gravity driven, inspired by a level in the FPS game Unreal Tournament 2004.

In the end however, we found that there was not a full consensus on the idea, and in the end decided to consider alternatives instead. Again, the group decided to part and come up with alternatives in their own time, and to present them Teusday.