I have decided to go for gore - old skool style

I now have a clear vision of what to do after talking to Phil and a few other people i.e. my best mate. I'm going to do a medieval style dungeon. It will be eerie, and the gamer will navigate through narrow, dark passageways to reach the top of the tower. The only problem is I DON'T HAVE A STORYLINE....yet. I will be using Assasin's Creed for references. After talking to Phil I have decided that I want to take Assasin's Creed and add a bit of Hitman and Lara Croft to the mix, I know it'll work but I just need to work on the storyline. This got me to thinking; we don't see many lead female characters in videogames nowadays, besides Lara of course. I might have a lead-girl rather than a lead-guy in the dungeon; the only question is 'how did she get locked up in the dungeon.' This got me to thinking (again): you don't see many games with siblings in them...and I liked the idea of a sibling rivalry - but I need a backstory for this rivalry.
The evil brother murdered the father and threw his sister - the rightful Queen - into the dungeon, and therefore became king. This is a very rough idea of the story, but I want to run it by Phil before I do anything stupid. Until next time. Peace!

Where I'll be taking this project (in my little head)

I did some research into the Games Rating system; the following are the categories that games fall into:

EC (Early Childhood)
E (Everyone)
E +10 (Everyone over 10)
T (Teen)
M (Mature)
AO (Adults only)

Since I had a picture of a dungeon there is no way in hell I can make this game suitable for the categories below teen, but I still was not set on the exact target age range, so I did some creative thinking. The creative thinking may be called lazy or useless information, I call it a way to sort my mind out and see where I need to take my environment. I went to my own games collection and I counted every single DVD and marked the ages. I own 2 games that would be classified as 'Everyone', 12 games that would be classfied as E +10, 10 games under Teen and 9 games under Mature. After looking at all the games (and playing a few) i decided to go for the late teens - early 20s range (Mature). Now the only question is in what way to use the source picture, there are so many ways I could interpret the idea - gory, funny, eerie etc. So many ways so little time. I will write more on my intentions next week after I've done some more research and possibly asked Phil for advice. I should have a clearer idea of what I'm doing.

First day of second-to-last assignment

Today we got our second-to-last assignment ('thank god'). For this assignment we were given a picture from the dreaded brown envelopes. I got a picture of a dungeon and I immediately came up with several scenarios. Before I get into these, I have a bit of a history with creating game environments; before I came to Uni I did a BTEC in Brighton that was game related, where I learned to build environments and other things to do with games. So, this assignment was right up my alley, the only problem being that I haven't done much in this field for a while and my skills were a bit rusty. The few scenarios that I came up with involved the idea of a First-Person Shooter, but before I could go into detail about this I wanted to think about what kind of audience I would be aiming for. After thinking on this, we had to watch a 'thrilling' video on the history of games presented by Tony Hawk (who is an absolute prat and should not be allowed to present another DVD feature. Ever). After this thrilling video I knew where I wanted to take the game, but I still needed an idea of my audience. Over the course of this week I will be looking into the rating system and seeing what sort of audience I'm looking at.