Project Backgrounder

High Moon Express began as a student production for the Game Design program at the Vancouver Film School. At the highest level small teams of student go through a full production cycle at an accelerated rate to complete the learning experience. On a pragmatic level the final product represents a small portion of a retail release. Thus the primary function of the project is to provide prospective employers with a playable demonstration of a student’s value to their team.

Fully Cooked Games was formed by five students.

Courtney Corcoran, David Heron, Jonathan Liaw, Billy Lind, and Joey Song.

Each member of Fully Cooked Games was selected based on their work ethic displayed in the first 3 terms of study and for their individual skills acquired before attending VFS.

Most importantly each member of Fully Cooked Games provides a unique design perspective. The initial design process was approached with the primary goal of highlighted these perspectives. To achieve this brainstorming was governed by ideals

1. The game should be determined by system, not level design, story, cinematics etc
2. These systems should be close to the surface, easily recognizable.
3. The game experience should be of a length and complexity that exposes all core systems

Game Concept Overview

High Moon Express

In the frontier town of Deadwood, four gunslingers must fight their way through hordes of werewolves to save the last train out of town.

Concept:

• Cowboys Vs. Werewolves

• The desire to be a superhero.
• The thrill of being chased, or facing an unstoppable force.

• Strategic movement.
• Timing based action (special attacks).

Simple Conflict Overview:

• The four heroes must defend against waves of werewolves.
• Each wave is comprised of 4 types of wolfs.
  • Fast Wolf
  • Heavily Armoured Wolf
  • Swarm Wolf
  • Armour Proportionate with Distance Wolf

• Each hero has a unique weapon ( Shotgun, Pistols, Gatling Gun, Rifle) which allows them to effectively combat two wolf types.
• Each hero has a unique special attack that shores up one of their weaknesses.
• Teamwork allows the heroes 'back each other up' making sure that no hero is exposed to a specific wolf type.

Gameplay Overview:
• What is the core gameplay experience in your game?//

Essence Statement & Game Goals

Four Gunslingers must fight their way through packs of werewolves to escape on the last train out of town.

• Players must move the four characters through the overrun town.
  • Creates feelings of urgency and purpose, feelings that are missing from traditional tower defense games.
  • Visually translates progression in the game systems/difficulty, into a linear map.
  • Allows the visual communication of strategic options.
• Each character has unique advantages.
  • Provides a link between the fiction and the gameplay
  • Furthers the significance of the strategic options.
• Together the four are strongest.
  • Best case scenario.
• They must separated in order to gather enough supplies to continue moving.
  • Obstacle that demands player choice.
• Ultimately, success is based on the player’s ability to choose when to rely on strength in numbers and when to split up.
  • Risk vs Reward situation that makes the strategic options compelling.

Check past blogs for more info on our game or check out our games website

I started with our concept art

Then using references animations from Capcom fighting games and images of wolfs running in the wild, I can up with this. A loop-able run and attack cycle

Starting with our concept images

Again, using references animations from Capcom fighting games and having my fellow classmates throw punches so I can see how their hands and arms move. I came up with this animation.

- Billy Lind (Designer, Animator, all arond good guy)

Check past blogs for more info on our game or check out our games website

Ghost concept art

Rough animation

- Billy (Designer, Animator, all around good guy)

Check past blogs for more info on our game or check out our games website

Here are our final concepts for our final project at VFS - Highmoon Express

Our Heros:

The Priest

"Doc"

Outlaw

The Can can girl

Enemies:

We are going with the idea of every hundred years or so a hoard of  werewolves raise to feast ( Think 30 days of nights). When they raised this time a small mining town was built on top of of them, with a civil war battalion in it. So in the game the werewolves that attack our heroes are wearing cavalry uniforms.

Fast Werewolf

Ghost

The Tank

- Billy (Designer, Animator and all around good guy)

Here is a peak into our process for coming up with our character:

The base our game needed four unique heroes.

I should probly mention that our game is going for campy comedy feel.

we came up with 4 type casts -

#1 Battle hardened ex-soldier, that has become a priest

#2 A stereotypical "Outlaw", references by Clint Eastwood's character the "Man with no name" from The good, the bad, the ugly. With threw in a twist that he is carrying a baby in a sling. The hope is while he is a badass outlaw, he has a kind heart (backstory still needs to be hashed out..)

#3 'The Dandy" Think Val Kilmer from Tombstone - A drunk, gambling badass

#4 The saloon girl - A petite girl, that carries a HUGE chain gun

From these ideas I spent a solid week rouging out figures and clothings for our charcters.

At the end of the process as a group we picked and pulled parts from my drawing to come up with the base of our four heroes.

Here is the proccess of bring the "Doc" and Priest to life

"Doc"

The Priest

- Billy Lind (Designer, Animator and all aroud good guy)

After 7 months of zero sleep and mountains of homework, term 4 (at Vancouver Film School, I'm in the Game Design course) has rolled around and our class is breaking off into groups for our final assignment - make a damn video game.

I'll start with our pre production. From day one we wanted to stick to two rules -
#1 Make a game using the Unity engine
#2 Since we only have 12 weeks to make a game, Lets make a very polished vertical slice of a bigger game.

After 3 weeks of meetings we locked down our game concept -
Four cowboys fight through a town infested by hoards of werewolves, as they try to catch the last train out of town.

We call it "High Moon Express" *authors note* We googled "high moon" and "high moon express" nothing along our game idea game up. Now after months of posting design notes on my personal website with high moon in the name. Some bots starting picking up the name and now the top entry for "High Moon" is a comic by the same published by DC. So while at the moument the game is still called "High Moon Express" we are in the process of changing the name, since we are not to keen on being suied by big old DC comics.