Darryl Long

This is the first Dev Diary for studio 1, we were tasked with the project to create a version of Missile Command, that must resemble and embody the style and tone of Bridget Riley. I hadn’t played missile command or seen any artwork from Bridget Riley before, so research needed to be done to complete this task.

The rules for missile command was simple and straight forward, studying and researching Riley’s artwork was a different matter, altogether. The artwork is something that I’m not too familiar with and therefore required a bit more time and effort to research. I found that her main form of art was Op Art which is art that by using geometric shapes are not meant to resemble anything in real life. I also noticed the change in her artwork over her career, the beginning artworks were painted in black and white and slowly Riley began to incorporate colour into her artworks, the results can be seen below.

After thinking about what I could do to incorporate the artworks into I noticed the drastic change in colour and patterns. I figured that there was something that we could do with this, and the patterns in all of the artwork were extremely interesting, and I wanted to find a way to incorporate this as well. I decided to change the game from a challenge based game to an aesthetic game. The main changes in mechanics are:

• Missiles have turned into coloured blocks instead
• The background of the play area is a black and white pattern
• When a coloured block hits the bottom of the screen it fills the bottom row and increased the height of the bottom of the play area.
• When the bottom of the play area reaches over 75% of the height of the screen the game ends
• The player will be able to launch counter-coloured blocks that explode in a circle of coloured patterns
• If a coloured block collides with the explosion it is destroyed
• The coloured blocks won’t be able to hit the counter-coloured block launch area and destroy them like they do in the missile batteries.
• As a coloured brick falls down the screen they distort the background pattern.

The final step of the pitch was to actually do it, this involved creating a power point for the concept and getting across the clear idea of the project that I have. This was then captured on screen and processed with a script explaining the details of the game.