Week 5 feels like the group is approaching norming.

Examine and Analyze

As a team, we struggled to decide on the most important next steps. I suggested that building out the GDD based on the template used in module 720. Another group member had already documented a story outline as part of our rapid ideation iterations over the last few weeks.

The start of the game is going to be a linear interactive narrative (Wilbraham 2021) to help us teach the core game mechanics. Working in a synchronous ideation session with the team, we came up with three main characters. We decided to make all characters playable, and have their strengths and weaknesses, with the goal that the player would care about them. (Rogers 2014)

Focusing on the things that matter, we ruled out working on control mechanisms and opted for mouse click control for the prototype. Good game designs come from constraints (Davis 2019), so hard decisions must be made between roguelike vs survival. Our idea was described as a casual plate-spinning game during the pitch, which resonates with what we were going for, becoming our core design principle. (Fan 2015)

Learnings and Actions

In module 720, I prototyped the core mechanics using twine to ensure I had sufficient mechanics while not having too much or too little to keep the player engaged. Prototyping this way worked well for me and helped solidify the core mechanics that are needed.

We did not do a text or paper prototype for this game, which has led to a wealth of ideas. Still, with limited development resources, we have limited ability to iterate on a prototype. However, I still believe this is something we should have prioritized.

Working on the GDD has opened up more questions to gameplay and has led to some gaps in core mechanics that we didn’t consider in our ideation sessions. These items include game music, sound, monetization and target personas. As a result, we must undertake additional research to cover these areas before the final pitch.

I will review alternative competitive games and document our differentiators for the pitch.

References

  • WILBRAHAM, Che Grant. 2021. ‘Embedded and Emergent Narrative’. [online]. Available at: https://flex.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/921/pages/week-4-interactive-narrative?module_item_id=49276 [accessed 21 Jul 2021].

  • FAN, George. 2015. How to Choose a Theme for Your Game [Film]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_sear6P058 [accessed 21 Jul 2021].

  • DAVIS, Matthew. 2019. Into the Breach Design Postmortem [Film]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_I07Iq_2XM [accessed 22 Jul 2021].

  • ROGERS, Scott. 2014. Level up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.