I'm going to just dump notes here whenever I feel like; they could be relevant of they could be completely garbage.

 

Also, I have been offered the chance to bring the Vertical Slice to a public exhibition in 5 months time, but I'll need to really step on it and start producing content.

 

• Vertical Slice = Murder Investigation: It'd be easier to do an investigation about a character you find in pieces on the street, rather than having to deal with the complexity of making a bus explode into lots of pieces. Since they're LEGO, we can pretend that the person can be put back together again to be friendly with the kiddies.
• "Slots": In the Simulation Mode, each different slot of the chain that you put events in is not in just some random chaotic order; each investigation has a set order, and the variation comes from what changed in each slot. As an example, pretending that each number denotes a slot, this is how it might look in a murder investigation:
  1. Entrance - How the deceased entered the scene.
  2. Suspect - What the suspect was doing before the murder.
  3. Weapon - How the suspect acquired/primed the murder weapon.
  4. Distraction - What caused the deceased to not notice the murder?
  5. Murder - How was the deceased actually killed?
  6. Escape - How did the murderer leave the scene?
  7. Call - Who alerted police to what happened?
• Potential Chain-of-Events #1: The deceased was killed by a careless banana-salesman who got into a fight with a monkey, tried to pull the banana off it but ended up launching the banana into the deceased so hard that he fell apart.
• Potential Chain-of-Events #2: The deceased was squashed when two men who were guiding a crane carrying a piano got into an argument and misdirected the crane.
• Animation: While we could try to pay someone to rig and animate the models, it's probably going to be best (given the 5 month timeframe) to simply cut down the animation content and keep it simple. Rely on rotating the body parts rather than deforming for things that absolutely MUST be animated, and try to use programmatic-animation where possible to reduce animation work. This demo can be graphically blocky so long as the gameplay is present and polished.

 

Those PCoE's are probably s***, but I'm tired and I'm not getting any big sparks coming to me. Feel free to bounce more ideas my way.

 

EDIT - 05/08/16

-> Face of the character gets rubbed off, falls to pieces

-> A character resembling Ogel should be present in every sequence, but despite how outwardly evil they appear, they should only be guilty in one minor crime scenario. This can help push a message about prejudice and assumptions, and help players understand why they need to find all the facts before drawing a judgement.

-> Forget FP for now; use Alpha Team-style cameras. This will make selection easier (for each camera, hold a list/array of the selectable items to cycle through) and gives a bit more cinematic control back to the designer. Should also reduce almost all physics-related work down to pre-designed cutscene stuff.

-> Work on one specific chain, and get those mechanics perfect. Forget randomisation for now. Once Chain A works, then work on being able to add more events and build in more content.

 

EDIT - 23/08/16

-> Floating Worlds: Each level is just a tiny chunk that floats in space, which has a camera that allows you to completely rotate the entire level around