Keeper Sprint 1: Team Micropup

Producer/Designer: Alex Frey

Programmer: Laura Reilly

Character Artist: Christie McCown

Environment Artist: Megan McAvoy

Tasked with creating a game's vertical slice in 12 weeks, my team began by brainstorming a list of 50 potential game ideas from which we would pick our favorites. Since several similar themes seemed to branch across many of the game ideas, we began to categorize and combine those which had things in common. This method benefited the team (and the game) by allowing us to reuse our good ideas and discard the ones nobody was attached to.

We managed to condense the list into about a half dozen fleshed out ideas that would have enough content to make a game out of. From there, we voted on our favorite three to see which ideas everybody was the most passionate about, deciding on the concepts "It Takes a Village", "Small Dog, Big Bone", and a currently unnamed "Gardening/Beekeeping Game".

"It Takes a Village"

It Takes a Village is a top-down multiplayer game in which players compete over the love of a demanding infant by completing its many baby-related needs. I created a hypothetical playspace to illustrate how players might need to navigate through the house when taking the baby to its tasks. One of my artists cleaned it up into an actual concept piece.

"Small Dog, Big Bone"

Small Dog, Big Bone is an 3D isometric dungeon-crawler where the player controls a dog trapped in Hell, fighting skeletons to steal their bones. Bury the bones to hide them from the skeletons before they can put themselves back together. The number of bones collected will determine the player's score.

"Gardening/Bee Game"

A 3D top-down farming simulator where the player controls a small fairy planting flowers to help the bees produce enough honey for the year. This idea is appealing because of the gameplay loop's relative simplicity as well as the prospect of iterating on the same "plant growth" function for all plants to save time and manpower. To illustrate how I expected the core gameplay loop to behave, I gave my programmer a flowchart which I later simplified and made more presentable (see below).