Research, Planning and Kickstarter Mock up!

RESEARCH

I started looking at Kickstarter pages, and looked at what they used to make their games stand out. I noticed that in Elegy for a Dead World they used a lot of gifs and little writing to make the game interesting by not giving away too much. STASIS  used a lot of visuals to show most of its ideas but also used other games to compare itself to. Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan used many animations and character descriptions to make people interested. I like how Elegy for a Dead World and STASIS showed their game idea. They used many visuals but also explained a little of the story and game but not too much, to make the reader want to play the game.

The Healing Process: Tokyo didn't have much "nice artwork" to show, it mainly showed the ingame art, I think I want to show some rendered and nice art work to make the backers interested.

IDEA FOR CUT-SCENES

I was talking to Gino and we both realized that cut-scenes in 2-D sidescrollers don't have to be a "bad thing". I got the idea of instead animating a whole scene in the game, it would be an artwork of for example Nova and Lux sitting in front of a camp fire. The picture would be still but nicely painted to set a mood. Text boxes would appear as Nova would talk to Lux. She might occasionally move her hand/head but the painting itself would keep still. (similar to how Dating Sims stay still/almost like an animatic). I think this could work nicely with my game, this way the player wouldn't be taken out of the game as much as they have nice artwork to look at. (and as they say, a picture paints a thousand words!). As I want my game to be told mainly visually, having the cut-scenes being more visual than animated would fit in really well, I think.

PLANNING FOR KICKSTARTER

As I was looking at different Kickstarters, I made a list of the game ideas I liked and tried to find out what exactly was it that kept me interested. I looked at their Pledge Rewards and the Kickstarted information. I also found that when most kickstarters talked about the gameplay aspect of the game, they showed gifs or mock ups of the gameplay. This is something I want to do.

I also tried to figure out how I will do the trailer, I'm thinking about doing the 5 second animation of gameplay and maybe do a rendered cut-scene to show as well.

KICK STARTER MOCK-UP

I started writing down some ideas for the mock up. After the planning, and looking at the Kick starter pages, I tried to get an overall idea of what I want to write and how I want to hook the backers. I am still working on thinking about what I should write and what I will draw for each section.