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=Fail Boat=

Design Doc Feedback

 * the idea of being the evil character is quite difficult as pure evil is not, actually, attractive. The greatest example of this is John Milton's epic poem (he wrote it in 12 books!!) 'Paradise Lost'. Milton was an English Christian mystic and wanted to show the rise of evil (think: Adam and Eve driven out of Paradise onto the Earth). But, he made Satan out to be so epically evil, some people believe he made Satan less evil than he is. Its a difficult line to follow, and no-one has successfully created truly attractive evil without adding some aspects of good. There is a theosophic line that there is no such thing as evil, instead evil is the absence of good, in much the same way as black isn't a colour and darkness is the absence of light. So, you may be battling against a fundamental here. Much the same goes for making good your opponent, you need to add enough evil to make the goodie the baddie and vice versa.
 * casual gamer - this does imply a not-so-evil evil, so you may get away with this spin; however, if the gamer is casual, why is (s)he using a keyboard and mouse? is your target hardware model right?
 * it all feels a bit generic - I need to see more about the environment and level design - ahhh, that appears later; OK!
 * of course, the concept art depends on the screen size, etc. See comment on 'casual gamer' above.

Overall - the fact that this feels generic is not a criticism, people and companies sell books, movies, TV series and games on the back of a generic idea made specific. I like the idea that this is a RPG and that it might not necessarily (my idea: John) be a huge thing to build. Call me dull, but I often think the back story is quickly discarded to get into the gameplay, so if you get a good game engine this could be created relatively quickly as a single level, possibly. Think about this as you finalise this doc and get onto the tech doc.

draft mark: 70%

final comments - lots of more detail added, which is good, but the air is thin in these areas, so little more can be added to the grade. This is a rich scenario, well presented in words and pictures. The idea is worth trying, at least to check out how and whether evil & good can be combined (John: my latest thoughts are that it depends on the player mindset.) Excellent work.

final mark: 75%