Games of Experience
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Video game development
The first making of article is about: Burke “Fishy” Callahan. How exciting. But this brings us to one of the more difficult aspects of creating a game. Where to begin? With the making of Burke we want to give you guys a better insight in how we are creating the game “Burke Fishy Callahan”. Pure logic. Now lets get this baby started.
You know the feeling that you want to start with your own personal project but you are just staring at this blanc piece of paper? Just waiting for an idea to pop up into your head. But after a while you give up, bummed that your imagination failed you. Sounds familiar? Well this is the very worst mistake people make when starting a new project. Because it is not your imagination that is failing you, it is the lack of inspiration. It takes inspiration to get the creative ball rolling. Ideas don’t just pop up out of the blue. When an idea comes up, your conscience or sub-conscience has been triggered by something. What is that ‘something’. That is your inspiration.
Inspiration can be anything. It can be a book you read, a movie you watched, something you saw on the street the other day ore a person you know. So it makes sense that when you’re looking for an idea, staring at a blank piece of paper isn’t going to help you much. The best thing to do is to go out there. Go to musea, take a walk, go to the zoo, watch films, read books. In short be curious and experience.
For example; One of the things that inspire me immensely is nature. I’m watching Nat Geo Wild as we speak. Except for now it isn’t that inspiring. Picture a polar bear dragging a cute seal over a snowy surface, with the intestines hanging out of his gut. It throws me off a bit. The Saw-fans would call it pure poetry. Moving on!
With Burke we started with the concept of a detective penguin called Burke “Fishy” Callahan who always smells it when something fishy is going on. How it al started? Two friends in a café and beer. Or that was when Emile and Richard started developing this idea that Richard made into a potential concept. And then I showed up, and was asked to visualize the concept they had. The ball started rolling even more. A couple of weeks ago we had a brainstorming session where we threw some additional ideas back and forth. It gave us the change to get a feeling of the style of the concept. And it also gave us a chance to sound out the opinions on the potential of this concept. To see if everybody was motivated enough to make this thing work. Everybody is definitely on for the ride, which leaves us to the task of making a solid storyline.
It’s very much necessary to have a good, solid storyline before continuing. We have a lot of scribbles and scraps, that we came up with during the brainstorming. The thing that is left for us to do now, is to put all the puzzle pieces into the right place so that we have a rough story that everybody agrees on. After this step is completed the only thing left for us to do then, is to write the final script.
With the final script approved, the first phase is finished. But we still have a lot to do before we’ll be this far. That was it for now. Tune in next time for the continuing of The Making of Burke Fishy Callahan.
