Dare Blogs – Funbox

The Lost Memories is an adventure platformer game for the PC being made using the Unreal development kit. This game is about (make a guess) an ant that has lost its memories. The player takes the ant through various locations in search of the ant’s missing memories. Each location has a different camera perspective for the player. For example, the underwater location has a vertical-scrolling gameplay and camera but another location might have a side-scrolling gameplay and camera.

The game world that connects these features a third-person viewpoint. Collecting memories gives the ant various powers while also revealing the cause of his memory loss. The player must use these powers to fight enemies or avoid obstacles in the world.

One of the biggest challenges that we faced so far is making our levels fun to play while also making them accessible to people who are relatively new to video games. Since the game changes its camera view in each level, we had to make sure that the flow of the game did not break, which we are trying to achieve via cut scenes. The visual style of the game is supposed to be appealing for kids, which is why we decided to implement cell shaded graphics.

Doing this was quite tricky since getting the right look needed a lot of tweaking.

During the competition, so far we have met mentors from various companies like Ruffian, Crytek, Codemasters and many others who gave us valuable feedback on our game and gave us ideas on how to make it better. Meeting other teams from different countries also helped us to better understand the process of game making and seeing their games inspired us to work even harder on our game. Dare is also a great place to really evaluate yourself against the most talented individuals from different countries in the field of game making and to prove yourself during ProtoPlay which is a great opportunity for us.

Dare to be Digital is not an easy competition to get into because the judges expect really good output from you at the end of the competition. You will not be allowed unless you convince them that you can really complete your project within the given time limit of nine weeks. Therefore you need good enough preparation even before you sit for the interview. Having a video of how the game will look like is very helpful. Your game needs to be innovative because that is what the judges look for, and making it family-friendly is an added bonus.

Team information and videos can be found on the Dare to be Digital team profile.

Also, we have a team Twitter account: @Dare2011_FunBox