A Gallant Journey: Designing a new prototype from scratch

This is part four of a series of articles chronicling the early development days of GallantCloud Games. You can read about their journey here.

Hello to all, I’m privileged to be writing this blog for GallantCloud games. As the sixth and newest member I have been welcomed with open arms to the team as game designer and I’d like to first thank the great guys at GallantCloud, Wayne, Ben, Paul, Mantas and Richard for the opportunity. 

When I was brought on the team I was introduced to ‘A Knights Tail’, an endless runner type game that the team had decided to push forward for development. After getting a feel for what the guys invisioned for this game I set off to write a High concept document to get everyone’s initial thoughts and ideas down in one place and as a tool to guide us all on the right path forward.

The team worked incredibly hard on developing a prototype that demonstrated the basic mechanics of the game. From that point I began to write up a game design document to flesh out the concept in a lot more depth.

Whilst doing this we were guided by one of our mentors to scale the game up so that we could incorporate more unique and fun aspects into the game. We took a step back and looked at ways that we could scale the game up quickly and felt that, with the time constraints that the team currently face, it would be difficult to scale up the design effectively. 

So the next task I was assigned was to bring two new concepts to the table for review by the team. I created two new high concept documents and put them up on our design wall. We read through these as a team discussing the pros and cons of each design before coming to a decision to work on ‘E-mailman’, a 2D platformer for mobile/tablets/PC and console.

Our mentors read this document and gave feedback to take it in another direction to make the game more unique in the current marketplace. We reviewed this as a team and decided to take the feedback on board and take the game in a new direction, from a 2d platformer into a 3d action game. 

We are all now hard at work, developing a new prototype for e-mailman. The art and code are coming along nicely and guiding the production of the game in new and exciting directions. I have been working on a new GDD for the game, taking into account the changes we made as a team. This document will provide the guys with a solid direction a reference in the development of the new title, ready for demo day.

So this past week has been a productive one seeing the evolution of a game into something new, the main challenges now are to implement our hopes and aspirations for this game, making it into something people can use with ease and most of all enjoy! We feel that the game has some brilliant and unique aspects to it and can’t wait to see it take form and get you all playing it! So that’s me signing off and wishing you all the best.