place holder
Victoria L
12
Posts
1
Topics
A member registered Sep 09, 2021
Creator of
Recent community posts
This week was a quiet week of reflection for the entire group. The beginning of the week was hectic since we had to finish our Game Design Doc and our second critique was due almost immediately afterwards. Our group seemed to stumble on what a winning play is, and how it differs from a winning condition or a core loop.
I was mostly waiting on the feedback for the GDD to understand what to focus on for the next version. Of course, when we received our mark we were confused and a little disappointed with what we received. However, Ayas had made quick remarks regarding the weakest areas of the report. We were also able to ask further questions during free time in the lab, and he explained clearly what he expected. I decided to format our report with headings and subheadings first so our team wouldn't need to rush and go through the rubric last minute. Because playtesting will be the focus for the next report, I have reached out to a few of my university friends to get them to try our (very rough) game out.
This week, we all worked asynchronously in the first half and met a few times closer to the due date of the game design document. We had to meet to clarify the details of the functional flow board, which we eventually did on Figma for the convenience and ease of editing. Like last week, my role was to extend the story more and tie it a little closer to the gameplay and objects. Previously, Ikura was a fish roe that got sent into another dimension by a witch. We wanted to keep it cutesy and light-hearted, so we switched the witch to a magical cat that made a blunder on their first time opening dimensions. Ikura's family was unfortunately caught in the middle and sent into it. Since Ikura's family was mentioned, we decided to utilize them as objects to be found. We decided to have Ikura find a sibling at every level, and the finding of the sibling would signal the increase of fidelity. We also thought about how the fidelity increase would work and decided to keep it simple with a colour and shading increase. This also helps to keep the world visually interesting. Ikura lives in a world of magic but Ikura itself can't use it. Maze navigation would require the player to use Ikura's physical strength to move obstacles in the maze around.
While writing the GDD, I also made the narrative flow board (a very simple version) and decided that the majority of the storytelling would occur in cutscenes before and after the primary gameplay mode. This makes it easier for the story to be communicated to the player while also keeping it straightforward for the team to work with. I hope that in the future weeks I will be able to add more complexity and make a more interesting story to experience.
This week passed by quite peacefully for our team. After receiving the feedback from the class and Eric and Ayas, we got to work fixing a few problems. Obviously the big question of "10 seconds" remained, but since we hadn't begun creating maps we left it as is. We divvied up the roles and we each got to work doing what we do best. Chell provided a ton of support to people in our Discord server by constantly sharing resources and checking up on progress.
I began ideating different storylines since we were told to connect the story and items a little more. Since the concept that we explained in class seemed lost on most people and maybe a bit confusing, I decided to see if we can simplify it. I brainstormed a few ideas that could work, but the team wanted to build on the theme we had thought of. I stripped back the superfluous stuff and with the help of Chell, rebuilt the story. I added family members, an ending, and a motivation for the character. I also brainstormed a few ideas for items and reasons to justify the game's fog of war and fidelity change. We stuck with a magical theme but tried to keep it lighthearted with nothing too spooky. Similar to what we had explained in class (collection of power crystals), we wanted to keep the item collection tied with fidelity change. However, during the rewrite I also managed to link it to character development, making fidelity tied to both item collection progress and narrative. While also writing the story, I had an image in mind of what the game's colour scheme would look like. Reina had posted some fantastic inspiration images for our design references, and coupled with that, I think our game is starting to take shape.
The first week of our development mainly consisted of scheduling meetings and rapid-fire brainstorming from the team. We had consisted of 4 people before having another person join our group. Meeting scheduling was a bit difficult since we had so many schedules to juggle, but we adapted and made it work. I had sent out an agenda for our first meeting and logged the things that we said and the ideas that we explored, which proved to be useful when some team members couldn't make it or forgot what we had talked about.
The first few meetings involved talking about potential game ideas and we bounced ideas off of each other while also looking at a few indie games. We had a few elements that we enjoyed and we tabled them for later discussion. I really like the idea of "meta-ness" in a game, and I brought it up in one of our meetings. I feel like having a meta element or having the story and characters become self-aware could be quite interesting especially if the game executes it right. Once we decided on the game idea (maze runner inspired with the surroundings gaining more fidelity as the player progresses), I started cracking on the game proposal. The proposal itself is not difficult to write, rather it is ensuring that I am writing correctly about the concepts that we want. I myself am uncertain of how many of the details that we brainstormed were going to make it into the game since the biggest thing running through our heads was to keep the game from being too rushed and ambitious. I don't want to misrepresent what the team is doing or give the wrong impression of our game to readers. However, the multitude of meetings that we have often steer us in a good direction of our game, making it easy to write.