This page serves as an aggregator for competitions & other events that we want to attend as a team: here you can find information regarding their application forms, requirements, deadlines and more. If you are writing a submission for any event, remember to visit the Pitch Document for any information about the game and the team.
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Max 200 Word - Brief Description
Play as an elite squad of inter-galactic explorers uncovering cosmic secrets about mysterious quantum planets holding the potential salvation for the last human fleet in existence. Try to keep your nerves as you fight for your survival against beings outside of human comprehension in an ever shifting environment that will change as you move through it. Explore the complexity of human personality as your choices and failures will influence your character’s behaviour and abilities, resulting in dynamic gameplay that requires you to adapt on the fly to new tactics and strategies and emergent stories that are shaped by your decisions. The procedurally generated environments, missions and narrative encounters will make every new playthrough different with it’s own set of miserable stories for your characters to suffer through.
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500 - 1000 Words - why your team believes your prototype idea could be the next 'indie success story' (experience to date, understanding of the market, research on the genre of game, community development, etc.)
- Market Justification
- We unanimously consider this game to be the most interesting project we’ve worked on in our entire time at University: Project Peregrine is ambitious and has the potential to appeal to a large variety of player types. First and foremost we believe that it would strongly resonate with fans of tense, stressful hardcore horror games. The game is relentless, inscrutable and stubborn, you are always a step away from failure and the cost of messing up is always felt for the entirety of a campaign: you will fail missions, enemies will overwhelm you if you are greedy, situations will get out of your control, you will lose your units permanently and your actions hold the potential to doom humanity.
- Our unique map-building mechanic allows you to dynamically shape the combat space as you play, abilities gain an extra level of depth as they’re not only used to fight enemies but also to build and destroy the environment, we believe this would strongly appeal to players that enjoyed the satisfying tile-placement mechanics of titles like Dorfromantik and other “worldbuilding” games. Merged with the tactical turn-based gameplay this mechanic will allow for your unique playstyle to be expressed through a change the combat space, but it will also create urgency as the ground is always unstable and your squad always a step away from being engulfed by the dark pits of the Quantum Planet.
- Project Peregrine is not only strong in “pure”, classic turn based gameplay but also strives to be a strong narrative experience, as the gameplay is closely tied to the narrative: choices you make in gameplay will also be reflected in the game’s story and viceversa, we are currently working on a system that responds to your decisions (and failures) and creates dynamic procedural narratives that challenge your decision making skills, moral compass and sense of duty. And speaking of narrative, we are confident that the thematic application of the mechanics will satisfy fans of science fiction stories that explore the human condition, such as the way our personalities change over time or what it means to be human, through intriguing scientific concepts like Quantum Mechanics and space exploration.
- Team
- This is not the first project we’ve worked on together, our collaborative experience started in our third year of University when we’ve worked on a game called “Project Scrapped”. We achieved our goals of creating an isometric cozy game in three months that could teach a young audience simple programming concepts, the project has been recognised by the University as an example of successful interdisciplinary collaboration, it has been included in the Third Year Showcase of the Abertay Digital Graduate Show and was used by the university for course promotion.
- Over the several projects we’ve worked on together our team has developed a powerful synergy and after the success of Project Scrapped we decided to make the unhortodox deicision of progressing into fourth year as a group and collaborate on the same Honours Project, the project that we are now applying at Transfuzers. Now that university is about to end we feel ready to tackle bigger chllenges and succeed not only in the academic context but also in the industry, we want to evolve from a simple study group into a strong and passionate team of indipendent professionals and we have set for ourselves the opportunity to hit the ground running.
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Provide a high-level overview of your project and how you plan to pull together key resources (i.e. people / finance / time / skills). A key part of this will be how you plan to manage the scope of your project throughout the competition to ensure you meet the programme deliverables and ship a playable prototype at the showcase event. You may want to mention project management techniques, identify key high level milestones and outline financial planning. We are not looking for a minute-by-minute breakdown of the project, but a high level overview of key stages during the competition; what we should expect to see at the end of the competition and what you will do to achieve this.
- The game we want to bring forward is our current Honours Project, we already started development on the prototype; right now we are exploring various gameplay mechanics to find our creative direction, we plan to have a fun to play prototype by our university submission date, the 17th of May 2022. We could consider this prototype as an alpha, the scaffolding for what is going to be the full vertical slice: most major mechanics should be implemented by then. From there we want to use Transfuzers as an opportunity to polish the prototype until it’s perfect, tweaking what’s needed and adding interesting mechanics, ramping up the production of final assets, ironing out all imperfections and preparing an high quality vertical slice of the full game. We all plan to maintain our current working hours (9 to 5) throuhought summer and treat this project as our fulltime job.
- We think this game would work incredibly well as a Roguelike: the dynamic tactical combat gameplay present in the demo would be only part of a larger game that includes different mission types, an overarching narrative and various meta-progressions systems like Character Upgrades, Equipment, light management of your squad and so on. By the end of Transfuzers we want to have a perfect rendition of the core loop, it should hook players, give them “15 minutes of fun” and leave them wanting for more. If we get funding from this competition we would use it as an opportunity to bring the development of our project forward and eventually release it as a full game.
- Although we believe to have meticulously reduced scope and risk by working on a project that resonates with our personal strengths, we think the game’s overall goals are numerous and ambitious. We want to achieve many difficult things, from exploring human personality and quantum mechanics to creating deep tactical gameplay and emergent procedural narrative, including the novel terrain building dynamics and the horror themes. Masterfully achieving all of this and merging it into a single package is a notable task of which we understand the difficulty. To convey all of these ideas in the demo we took some of the mechanics that would take the entire game to properly explore and adapted them, compressed them so that their essence can be experienced in just 15 minutes of gameplay, giving you an idea of what the core pillars of the game would be about but also reducing scope considerably.
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Max 100 Words - Development Gaps - Explain how you will fill any gap that your team might have (Programmer, Level Designer, Sound Designer etc...)
- For now we have reached the maximum amount of team members allowed in the competition and we feel like there are no major gaps in our team, but if needed we plan on investing the budget granted to us by Transfuzers to outsorce some parts of development that are not fundamental to production, like voice acting or professional consultancy.
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Max 100 Words - What is strong about your application? - Why should we consider your application over others?
- We believe our biggest strength is the cohesion we already have as a group: by collaborating for the last year and a half we have already proven that together we can be successful at producing high quality work that meets our rigorous standards, we consider ourselves to be experienced team mates with already established pipelines and processes and we share an high level of trust that contributes to the creation of a safe environment where everyone is comfortable in sharing candid feedback. We confidently believe in this game, a product of everyone’s contribution to the project, and we are determined to see it to the end.
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Max 100 Words - What are the weak points in your application?
- This project was born as a coalition of several different research questions: how to design characters for horror games, how to create balanceable systems, how to create emergent narratives and how to use Spiky Design to create an horror tactics game. For this reason most of the work that has been done has roots in the academic nature of our individual questions and we haven’t yet spent enough time bringing the creative direction together. For now we feel that the weakest point in the application is in fact the creative direction, the project needs a stronger market question, something that will make us and other people excited about the potential value of the game in the landscape of modern indie game development, something that will make us dreamy.