Unit 12 Brief - Specialist Study
This project is the project that comes before our final project and it is meant for us to conduct some research towards a certain element of our final game, this can be from the game type, the genre of the game or even a mechanic of the game. In my case, my research will be going into the idea of free-roam and will be researching free-roam games. This could vary from research into the first free-roam games and also some more well known and really famous ones like the GTA series, these games are well known for their free-roam features and being able to do loads in a open world. However I could also look into the darker side of free-roam as well, these could be games like fallout or possibly some horror games as well, such as manhunt, despite not being a actual horror game it was people running around trying to kill you. On the brief it also says how we also have to do to things like mind-map so I could also come up with some more ideas as well, so this is quite open at the moment and there are many routes to go down. I think this project could also gives me lots more ideas towards my final project that I can write down and use.
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Chosen Topic - Free-roam or Horror Genre
Mind-map for Initial Ideas
Codes and Conventions for Unit 12
Visual - free-roam has seen to be in both 3rd and 1st person in different games and in games like GTA has the use of both available. Props are usually suited the game genre e.g. in a horror game everything would be mostly old, dirty, messy and dark, likewise with the lighting, this would be very dark and gloomy. Colours again would depend on the type of games, so could vary from light and sunny to dark ad at night with a full moon.
Technical - Characters and AI walk or move in ways that are suited to the game type, if it was dark then you may have monsters running, crawling or possibly not moving at all, in some cases they move when the player is not looking. Sometimes there are things the player can't do, this could be as simple as not be able to enter a room to not being able to run and shoot in games like in some horror games.
Audio - In free-roam games the general audio tends to be quiet and is usually things like the noise of the weather and people in the distance as well as things such as cars and so on these tend to be non-diagetic sounds. Then like in all other games, when in free-roam you can usually hear something quite a lot louder when you interact with it. However in other games you have very very quiet audio to build the tension and then when you get something happen, most of the time being jump scares, the audio instantly becomes very loud to increase the adrenaline, we can see this in pretty much every horror game from FNaF to Resident Evil.
Narrative - In free-roam games you tend to still have missions as story and as narration, however sometimes in some free-roams you can find collectables, pictures and other bits of similar nature that tells other stories with more and more you find. One example is in GTA when you find collectable weapons.