Realistic Design

Pod & Rodney was a game that I had in my design portfolio since about 1998. It's gameplay style was something I've always had a small fetish for: grid constrained box pushing puzzles. Later in my life, during my college years, I wanted to take the design more seriously.

Realistic design is a mandatory process when you have little to no budget and a small team. Normally my design portfolio consists of games that are designed with the following process:

1. Gameplay design
2. Story based on gameplay
3. Art direction based on story

Pod & Rodney was designed with a much more rigid process, in order to insure that it could one day be made with minimal cost and minimal team size, a.k.a. Realistic design:

1. Budget constraint calculation
2. Technical constraint calculation based on budget
3. Gameplay based on technical constraint
4. Art direction based on gameplay
5. Story direction based on a factory, aliens, and robots

This may seem like a no brainer, but most amateur design teams (of which we most definitely fall into the category of) will get tripped up by not following this process. It's good and well to think big, and I support it at all opportunities possible, although game design requires quite a bit of unglamorous and time consuming work that a lot of design teams do not anticipate.

So here we are with a realistic project that a two man team can tackle in a realistic amount of time. We hope that it will turn out fun for others, and we are certain it will be fun for us. Greg has been hard at work overcoming some coding hurdles that we foresaw during the design and concept phase. Once we solve the grand pitfall that is 'getting Maya to export a usable file format', we will have a much prettier picture to show.