Sketches!, Storywriting by proxy (Hjalmar) and proffessor meeting

Main menu concept art
(pacinian corpuscle, neurons, flashlight, light sensitive cone cell, piano, ear with cochlea and a hair cell)

Unspoilable story

My story writer has not yet made the story, it seems like I wasn't clear enough about what he was
suppose to be doing, actually I don't even know exactly what he is suppose to be doing. I have found it complex to give clear story-writing-instructions that motivate to writing. I decided to meet with him today and begin together to write the story. We made progress! We decided that there will be an evil colleague who does terrible things to the player and in the end the player will... I wont spoil it!

I think he has more ideas of what story to write but I'm not sure, maybe he has to much unclear freedom. I will ask him. We have decided that I write a "level sheet" (see previous post) for every level and then he has to take those components and make a beautiful story. He mentioned that it may be hard to reach mainstream while also have an interesting story, I agree. But I really want the game to be playable by 8 year olds as well as 30 year olds. I'm hoping that Hjalmar will find some super solution like Disney, that reaches a broad audience (for the whole family!). But the most important thing for me is that Hjalmar himself is proud of what he has accomplished. That way he may like to work with me another time also!

I did work on the levels but I am not sure when I will be done with the level-sheets. Deciding what level comes when and what things will happen is a very big workload. It actually makes the whole gameplay.

Svitri and I had a meeting with a clever proffessor at umeå university (Staffan Johansson) and it was very interesting! We had approximately 20 questions and got very good answers. Now we know that drugs may be the biggest threat to the brains thinking in todays society. This will influence the game, we will try to have different drugs affecting the neurons in the game so that people can learn more about what it actually does to neurons. Alchohol, tobacco, LSD, mushrooms... and so on, so forth. We know that you use polylysin on the petridishes so that the neurons stick and don't wash away. They may wash away if you let a stream of toxins or other substances flow over the neuron and this is actually what Staffan does. He knows allot about this. He also gave us directions to other proffessors that know allot about embryology and exactly what kinds of actionpotentials neurons can fire. We will try to get to meet 3 other proffessors about these questions and I believe that it will greatly increase our knowledge.

I would gladly look at this picture if it where real

Also I will try to arrange a meeting where we can watch and take some photos about how they actually work so that I can see how a petri dish looks like , maybe through a microscope and in a refrigerator. That way the grafics of the game can be very accurate and the phots can also work as a form of trophés for players who play really well and deserves achievements. If a particular photo of a petri dish with a cigarette and a neuron was taken and I had played a level where a cigarette poisoned my neurons, I would gladly look at that picture!





In an attempt at deciding more exactly on the gameplay I used the technique of prototyping. This way I can play a simple (very slow) version of the game to get a really good feeling about it.

Looking at the masters is also a good way to get great ideas and see what works and what doesn't. I've looked at 20+ tower defense games and this I really like:

Inspiration ( TowerDefense by Moon blossom studios ) (It's free, I love the graphics and sound effects)