Paddle smash artwork - round 2

Vector artwork, just to give a little more color and get closer to the idea. Still not what I would consider final designs. Once we got the bugs in, we knew we needed a bug splat so here they are:

 

 

 

 

This is the candy that we'll put in the middle of the paddle. The bugs will crawl toward the center trying to eat the candy. The player tries to bounce the ball on the bugs, squashing them before they get the candy.

Paddle Smash artwork - concept

This is some of the early prototype artwork. Sketchy and not meant to be final at all. Being an animator, I'm kind of out of practice with my design and coloring skills. I love sketching and drawing, however, and coming up with the early designs was fun.

I consider it prototype artwork however, just artwork that can be used to sell and develop the mechanic. It's meant to be rough and dirty and placeholder. In development we'd work with a concept artist or team to get the final designs. Enough excuses, here it is:

Prototype #1 Paddle Smash

Our first assignment was to take a common toy and turn it into a game. We organized into teams that our professors Roger and Bob predetermined and were given a toy. The toy we were given was a paddle ball.

Getting the paddle ball was an insane coincidence for me. A few months earlier I had thought of a mobile game that featured the paddle ball. I wondered if you could make a game that used the paddle ball mechanic with a mobile device. When conceived a few months earlier, I thought it might be fun to hold your phone in the palm of your hand, and bounce the phone up and down in a paddle ball motion to try to keep a bouncing ball on your screen.

As soon as we got the paddle ball, I pitched the idea. The team seemed responsive to it, but recognized it was just a mechanic not a full game. So we sat down and brainstormed a game. This was a great experience. We came up with a few ideas, our producer Jackie, pitched the idea of defeating enemies using the paddle ball mechanic. We riffed on this for a little bit and decided we'd use enemies coming to the middle of the screen and we had to smash them with the ball before they got to the center.

What struck me most about the first hour or so of this team, including this brainstorming session, was how well we all gelled together. The ideas flowed quickly and organically, and we moved fast toward a solid idea. Even though we all had very different personalities, we seemed to be on the same wave length from the very beginning. We accepted ideas regardless of how far fetched they seemed, but could also move in the same direction toward the ideas that we felt we could execute on the best. For me it was electrifying. Not something I experience often working in the studios that I have. Animation is a very different process, and I wouldn't expect an experience like this one, but it was pretty exhilarating. Most of the remaining meetings I would have with these guys would be like this. We seemed to work very well together, and I thought our team was highly functional, respective, and intelligent.

After our first meeting we decided the theme would be a young boy who enjoyed terrorizing insects. The kind who would fry a bug with a magnifying glass, or tape a firecracker to a grasshopper. A character like Sid in Toy Story I.

 We started creating the prototype.

The Class

For those who don't know, the rapid prototyping class is a class you take in the first semester of the EAE graduate program. Since I'm going part time, I'm taking it in my 3rd year. It consists of all the students in the cohort, including producers, artists, tech artists, and engineers.

The cohort I'm currently taking the class with is cohort 5. I started school with cohort 3, the group that made Cyberheist, and Vynil, but they've graduated.

In our rapid prototyping class with cohort 5, there are a about 50 students. A huge class to fit in the first year studio at the U.

The class is team taught by Bob Kessler and Roger Altizer, 2 of the founding faculty members of the EAE program .

Bob Kessler

Roger Altizer

In the sixteen week class we will create 4 different prototypes. For each prototype we divide into small teams of 5 - 6 people consisting of engineers, producers, artists, and tech artists. We're given the parameters for each of our prototypes by our professors. They give us the rules, the restrictions, the goals, and the tech we are to use. We then have 4 weeks to create the prototype, pitching the prototype at various stages during it's development, iterating as fast as we can to get the best prototype possible.

For each of these prototypes we'll use different game engines, and usually use the agile system of development. the class is very much about the prototype, while Bob and Roger instruct and give feedback, the nature of the class is very much a development class. Making prototypes is what we do.

This Blog

This blog will serve as the space where I document the work done in my rapid prototyping class in the EAE program at the University of Utah.

The experience I'm having in this class is exactly the type of experience I was looking for in a grad school focused on games. It's a chance to work on small teams to quickly build and test ideas through games and prototypes, and I'm really enjoying it.

Surprisingly with 9 years in the video game industry, I have yet to be involved in this type of game prototyping. So far it's been an awesome experience working on these teams, learning the things I'm learning, and making and iterating on prototypes.