Very productive meeting this Sunday! Gian (our controller expert) came in for the first half to discuss possibilities for controller setups and components. So far, building our own controllers looks like a very manageable and cost-efficient task. However, we still have a lot of research and brainstorming to do! More on this as it unfolds.

We spent the second half of the meeting talking about the progress we’ve made in our teams. On the dev side, we’ve started some rough prototypes and code experiments. Nycole set up a server to run the game in two rooms for both teams.

Ben Mo showed us an RTS “engine” he created featuring knights and castles (still frames can’t really do these justice, but here’s a few screenshots to give you an idea):

Castle knights

Ben Mc set up a sweet demo of flockers with trails in AS3:

Picture 14 with longer trails

We’ve also made some progress on the design side.

Ellen showed us some preliminary underwater terrain sketches she’s been working on with sand and with volcanoes and lava (we liked the idea of integrating the nodes into the environment/story):

lava_sketch water_sketch

And Steph had a few environment concepts as well (using marine life as terrain):

starMtn2 starMtn

And I started working on some rough character ideas including trail styles (we liked the idea of incorporating angler fish into the character designs, but we felt that considering scale, simpler is better).

v1 v2 v3

Gian also brought up a good point during the meeting–that our game still doesn’t have a strong “hook.” What makes it more than just another wii game? Why is our game unique, unlike all others? We think this is a very important question, so we’re going to take some time to focus on refining the “hook” to our game.