I'm not going so far in Geoshie as to actually make a language, or even the semblance of a language - for obvious reasons. In any case, I'm not sure how much Geoshie would benefit from a system like that even if I could pull one off. What I do love, however, are games like Aquaria that use their own alphabets. Aquaria is actually a great example here because it doesn't teach you the alphabet - it gives you enough of a translation to figure out what symbols correspond to what letters and leaves the rest to you to do on your own time.
I've spent far more time talking about mechanics than any story or game world with Geoshie, and while most of what I write here is going to be frustratingly vague, I want to give a quick look into some of the more interesting things I've been doing lately.
I've been putting a lot of thought into character development lately: just what it is that makes a protagonist leave a meaningful impact on a player and what allows us to identify with fictional people around us. I feel like one trap that would be easy to fall into at this point is to focus so much on the world and general story around the characters that the plot drives the people in it, rather than the other way around. I can invest a lot of time into making a great story to the exclusion of all else, but down this route everything just starts to become really boring really quickly.
So Microsoft came on campus Friday/Saturday and sponsored their Imagine Cup event, which basically boils down to a 20 hour group programming session with pizza. The whole thing went really well; I got a ton of stuff done with Geoshie and got some very nice feedback from a Microsoft rep.
Have a video going over some of the new features!
At this point I get to start thinking about the Geoshie end goal. There are a couple of ways the project can go right now.
One is to stay with the original plan and make Geoshie an RIT exclusive game. If this is the case, the best situation would be if RIT got involved in the project itself and handled some of the promotion/distribution, or even better let me do a coop with them over the summer. I don't know how feasible that is, so I'll be doing some extra research into that over the next week or so, but this is the first option I'll be pursuing.
The second possibility is to follow up with Microsoft rep and look for official certification. This would require a significant rewrite of at least one or two sections of gameplay, which isn't necessarily a detriment to the overall game, it'll just move from being a pre-built experience to a procedurally generated one, and the narrative will be altered to allow for more continuity of play and variability of setting. If this is the case, and if anyone in industry is willing to do any promotion of the game at all, I'll leave it exclusively on the Windows Phone 7.5 - 8 platform. Again, this is something that I know nothing about, so I'll be doing some more research into this for a while.
There are a couple of other developments that I'm not going to talk about at the minute, but you can start to get an idea of the state of the project, which is that I'll have to start making decisions about where exactly I'm going with it, whether I want to keep working alone on it, etc... And in order to make those decisions, I'm going to have to do a lot more research into what options are actually available, so that's the main priority.
As far as development goes, the next arc I have planned is more map/gps integration. I'll try and get Geoshie wandering around the campus and dropping off locations and items, and then I'll build some simple gameplay prototypes and start doing some testing to see for sure what works and what doesn't.
Also have some concept art, because I rarely end up sharing any of this stuff with you guys.
About time for another update? I really need to keep more on top of this blog...
In any case, if you'd like to see an actual working model of Geoshie's augmented reality "Goggles View," you can come up to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester this Monday, October 8th, anytime from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm. I (and a whole bunch of other RIT students) will be demoing our games and trying to talk them up as much as possible.
I hesitate to post pictures like this out of fear that people will get a wrong impression of what Geoshie is. If you promise someone an action thriller and then deliver a game where the story is told almost entirely through diary entries... well, someone is going to have a problem with that.
I'm really overdue with a really detailed gameplay explanation, but you're not going to get it in this post, so have some other notes instead.
