How did we establish our current idea of this colorful 2D metroidvania world with unique monsters and dynamic combat/environment abilities? We will show you our early concepting journey! 

First off, here's our current game concept features:

• Metroidvania
• 2D topdown
• Upgradable hub
• Large interconnected world
• Fast real time action combat
• Simple combo system, 2 button (eg. Castle Crashers)
• Multiple unlockable dynamic abilities (for combat/environment)
• Unique characters
• Exploration
• Adaptive/dynamic soundtrack
• Cute but spooky art style with neon elements 

But, how did we get here?

In early September we started accumulating ideas. We had a lengthy group call and discussed generally what features we would all like in the game. At this point, it was very early days so we still had a lot to narrow down on. Below you will see the notes I took down for this meeting:

We kept exploring our ideas with these general valuable features in mind while having frequent group calls and by early October we had all done either storyboards or documents that contained each team members concepts (bearing in mind, we all followed a similar over-arching narrative theming, game genre, game inspirations and idea of character focus)...

Megan's "Porcelain Warriors" Concept (Metroidvania - Broken Characters with Special Abilities to fight Evil - Skill Tree):

We all liked the idea of a broken character and using mechanics to portray this; however we choose not to do a skill tree (as shown in the concept above) and decided to focus on real time combat with simplistic combos.

In regards to the other team members, Tab made documents based on dungeon crawler and boss rush concepts, Oisin's concept had an emphasis on various enemy types and abilities, while Michael and Aaron focused on the colorful game world of creatures in an underground society. As a response, we took the monster game world vision of Michael and Aaron's concepts alongside the fast-paced feel and ability features of Tab and Oisin's ideas.

After analyzing all our ideas, we started to unify our concept by finalizing core features of our game on an online Whiteboard... As you can see below, it is a mess but a beautiful mess, as we defined once and for all the elements of our game (to note, don't mind the sketches!):

After establishing our current concept, Michael created our one page game design document that clearly illustrates our game to date:

We are now currently defining in detail the narrative design of our game, check in for updates!

However, we have some wonderful Concept Art to show you in the meantime...

- Megan