Hello everyone, and welcome to the Black Ink site!
My name is Jacob Haubjerg Madsen, and I’m the Game Designer on the project.

But what does a Game Designer actually do? I actually get asked this a lot, even though I have not been in the job for very long, and figured I could just as well get it covered: As a game designer, I design the game. Surprise huh?
To be more precise, it is my job to figure out how the various game play elements work, how we design the levels of the game, and overall how you, the player, experiences the game when you battle through it.

And that doesn’t just mean sitting down in front of the PC thinking “Hm, you know what would be really cool? A Tower Defense mode! Everyone loves a good tower Defense!”
First of all, it would have to somehow fit into the theme, idea and plot of the game, so as to not just be a cheap add-in.
Secondly, I would also have to describe HOW this hypothetical Tower Defense mode should work, as we obviously can’t just throw Plants vs. Zombies in and then be done with it (although that would be cool…).
I would need to sit down and figure out what it is that makes Tower Defense games so interesting, and then try and take all of that, and implement it as well as possible into OUR game.

For example, we pretty quickly figured out that we wanted the player to have a choice in how to play the game, and leave as many possibilities as possible open.
Therefore, quite early on in the game, the corridor that leads to the you to your objective is blocked by some rubble.
Your companion will tell you to find some ingredients for TNT, but there are several other ways for the player to get through, including ramming down walls with a fork lift.

That isn’t all though.
To make the game truly interesting, you have to make it stand out. Of course, you can make great games by just taking an existing idea and make it better, but what TRULY makes a game stand out, is when it tries new things.

Ever heard of Portal? Pretty sure most of you have, but for those who haven’t heard of Portal, it’s a first person platformer, whose entire gameplay is based around portals (wonder where they got the name for the game from, huh?), or more precisely, a gun with the ability to create portals, and some realistic physics.
Portal wasn’t a very long game, and though it featured an interesting story, what people really remember it for is its original and fascinating gameplay.

What they did with portal, taking a classic genre, and giving it a unique twist, is one of the holy grails of game design, and of course we are working towards that too, as I hope to be able to show you sometime in the future.

This was the first of a line of posts detailing what we actually do here on the Black Ink project, and I hope to come back with more info soon, and in the meantime feel free to email me your questions!