Entry 01 - What It Means
My first blog post for Project Viteză, where I explain what it’s all about.
Hi, my name is Jack Gilmartin. I am one of the members of Team Viteză, a team of three students formed to develop a game as part of their simulated placement, the final hurdle of their third year of Games Development at IT Sligo. Our team consists of:
- Adrian Fearon
- William Corr
- Myself
Without further ado, let’s talk about the game we plan to develop over the next 12 weeks or so.
The Concept
A week before our sim placement began, Adrian approached me with the concept for the game he wanted to develop: A light-hearted 2D platformer that combines the high-speed action and precision platforming of the Sonic the Hedgehog series and the ability-based gameplay of the Mega Man series. I liked the idea as I had always been a big fan of platformers, both 2D and 3D, like Sonic, Crash Bandicoot, Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter, the list goes on. I wanted to try my hand at creating a game like one of these, and so, I teamed up with Adrian.
After Adrian had mentioned the ability idea, as well as how we could implement dynamic music that could alter as the player changes their currently-equipped ability, my mind was free to wander and think about cool ability ideas that we could give our character. We’re still in planning phases for those abilities, but my current wish is to have the abilities as physical pieces of equipment that are added to the character’s sprite as the game progresses. For example, if the player unlocked a hypothetical “Goggles” ability, which would allow them to see through fake walls or other illusions, the goggles would appear on our character, like in Ratchet & Clank. We’ll see how it goes in the coming weeks.
I also thought about the flow of the game in general, I figured that these abilities should be unlocked by defeating bosses at the end of a level, this would adequately prepare the player for the next level, as well as give them the incentive to replay previous levels to find any areas they couldn’t access without the ability they just unlocked. Since the game would be inspired by Sonic and Freedom Planet, I also thought about how important it would be to balance high-speed momentum-based movement with careful platforming. I thought of a technique I’d like to attempt in the coming weeks: A “Speed Camera”, a game camera that zooms out further as the player moves faster, and zooms in as the player moves slower. It’s a concept that carries some risk with it, I may get it working and find that it doesn’t suit the game in the end. I believe it’s a worthy endeavour however, since it’s important for us to take risks and try something new.
The Meaning of Viteză
Just before our placement began, we were joined by our friend William, he also liked Adrian’s concept and wanted to join us, this made up our current team of 3. We quickly set up a Discord call and got together to talk about the game, the main character and its scenario. After some discussion we came up with our main character, a lynx we call Katt Viteză. Adrian initially thought up the idea of the character being a lynx, together we brainstormed and researched, looking up information on the Eurasian Lynx, an inhabitant of various locations in Central and Eastern Europe. Since our character would be fast, we eventually came up with her name by combining the Swedish word “Lokatt” (“Lynx”) with the Romanian word “Viteză” (“Speed”) to form the name “Katt Viteză”. Though the final name for our game has not been decided, we soon named our dev team after the character, and the game itself will almost certainly have her name in the title.
The First Week’s Work
My first week of work mostly involved setting up everything for our project, this included our GitHub organisation, our repos, the Game Design Document, our project blog and our project schedule, in that order. Fairly standard stuff, but it had to be done. In the meantime we discussed our ideas for the game and assigned roles to each other once I had the project schedule prepared.
The Next Week’s Work
After I had the project schedule set up, I assigned myself the tasks that I want to work on next week, the first being the game’s main menu. Here’s a glimpse of the tasks I’ll be working on over the next week or so:
The tasks I’ll be working on in the immediate future.
I think that about sums it up for our first week working on Project V. Wish us luck for the next week!
‘Til next time.
