Vinyl Over the Months

I've been painfully aware that my blog posts this semester have been sporadic and pretty barren, and figured I'd take this time to actually make a thorough post about the design evolution of Vinyl and my next post will be about the problems we've had making progress over the semester what we plan to do to remedy that.

First Design

So the initial idea for Vinyl is pretty much nothing even remotely related to what the game is now.  Way back at the beginning of the semester everyone in our cohort was charged with pitching a game idea to be a potential thesis project.  One of our professors made the comment that he really liked music games so it might help our chances of getting chosen.  This sounded great to me, I've always wanted to make a music game.  So I got together with Mike and we tried to come up with an idea by looking at every cool music game we knew of.

Naturally that didn't work out that well, but a few days later I came up with the idea of turning the grinding mechanic from Sonic Adventure 2 into some kind of music game where you are grinding on the strings of some sort of instrument.  The idea was by jumping from rail to rail dodging obstacles you could essentially play the string part of the song.  This blossomed into a few other ideas such as flying through a brass instrument or bouncing off drums.

Second Design

So pretty much the only ideas from that game that made it over was that it's a music game, you can grind and it was still sort of a forced runner.  Or at least that possibility was solidified.  At this point Mike came up with the idea of being inside a record.  The player would grind along the ridges and do similar things as before.  Oh wait, I lied, we tried to incorporate the older instrument ideas as a sort of bonus section.  The problem with this was by essentially being the needle on a record, you would be in the groove and not of the ridges in between.  This problem of how far we pushed the actually being a needle in the record versus just breaking the rules of how records worked kept recurring.

Third Design

When we officially started prototyping we decided it would be better if we were in a groove and the game played a bit like the special stages in Sonic the Hedgehog 2.  The game got much simpler at this point, we went back to the roots of what made music games interesting and incorporated synchronizing gameplay with music.  To do this we spawned enemies based on notes of the song and sped up the music and slowed it down according to the speed of the player.  Some of this may have been in the second design, I'm a bit fuzzy.  The main point of this iteration was to emulate being in a record, while still being fun and not destroying the song too much.

Fourth Design

Our current plan is very similar to the fourth.  We have just included a few more mechanics, like grinding on the edges of the halfpipes.  We decided after prototyping that we were almost exclusively making the song sound terrible and that we wanted to look more into enhancing the music.  We found ways to do that from games like the new SSX.  Also, to further solve the problem of what a needle in a record is actually doing, we decided the player should be pulled by the needle like a wake boarder.  Therefore he can influence the needle a little, but the needle never leaves the groove, but the player can.

I'm pretty happy with the ideas for the game.  However we were supposed to ideally be design locked ages ago.  We're currently prototyping these new ideas out and plan to be design locked by the end of the semester so the students available can try to get us into alpha over the summer.  Next post I'll discuss how we got behind.