Week 9 & 10 - Final Sprint

This week’s group meeting revolved around visual narrative and developments of the prototype storyboard. The changes proposed added significantly to the origin story. Difficult decisions need to be made regarding an MVP.

Examine and Analyze

Following both internal and external playtesting, it was clear that several issues plagued the prototype, including a general lack of fun and a compelling reason to keep the fire alive. The lack of fun we believed was down to a lack of long terms goals to achieve.

Revisiting our key design pillars, we were able to resurface the survival/crafting core of the game. Focusing on the survival aspect, we decided that adding snow and freezing death would make the reason more apparent for keeping the fire alive.

The universal health bar was not immediately apparent to all players, so after some research (Plummer 2016), we enhanced it with a new UI to make it more clear.

The long term goals of the game must be rooted in the crafting element, which should make the survival component easier. This relationship will not be linear. Each new area will be increasingly tricky until the latest technologies are unlocked, which gives the player a sense of mastery and achievement. Multiple sources were researched and evaluated to develop iterations of a crafting tree to give players a view into upcoming challenges and rewards (MCCAFFERTY 2006; Sorensen et al. 2018; ‘Prehistory Timeline’ 2021).

Improving the game world to feel more like a playable demo than a collection of items dropped in for testing required additional research into level design. Designing a level with purpose, hinting at familiarity, and leaving items of cultural evidence (Edwards 2016) were all elements I attempted to include in the first level design. For example, I used trees and rock walls to provide paths for the player to explore, with hand-painted rocks used only to guide the player in the correct direction. The denial and reward concept proved to be successful in playtesting.

Our supervisor suggested that we add in a minimum time commitment to our team charter. Rather than simply adding this to the original document, I took the time to research crafting appropriate contract addendums (Horwitz 2020; UpCounsel 2020) and built out an addendum that required fewer team review cycles.

The caveman font (Flood 2021) in use in the presentation, and the game was cleared with the creator for educational use.

Learning and Actions

Reflecting on progress and the success of the game so far, it is clear that our initial enthusiasm didn’t directly translate into a fun and engaging game and that more work is still needed. Critical success isn’t always possible (Birkett 2016). It is essential to have various game ideas and stay true to your core design even if it only has a narrow audience.

Researching for the pitch, it is clear that Steam game numbers for popular games are very high, but this has to be tempered with the realism that most games on Steam do not sell anywhere near that volume (Rose 2018). Understanding that we are not creating an asset pack remix and something new, and our IP does separate us from the pack. It is also apparent that more work is required to refine the demo before it is anything approaching a commercial success. This fact plays a significant contributing factor in the choice of the audience for our pitch, which is for funding to further develop the demo.

Reflecting on the challenges we’ve had in the team, it was enlightening to learn that successful game developer Spry Fox (Fray 2021) typically only has one developer and one artist on each game they produce; this must significantly improve communication and reduce effort spent on consolidating and integrating multiple developers work. The counter-side of this is that the game will take longer to develop and involve fewer “points of view”, leading to a less diverse and exciting game.

While considering the level design for the demo, we had discussions around emergence vs progression (Juul 2002). Given the tight timelines and focus on MVP, we opted to focus on the impression of emergence through the development of the crafting tree, hoping to show the potential avenues of exploration, discovery and combat that will be available to the player in later stages of the game. While these appear to be offering free choice, they will all be required to progress, requiring the player to experience more aspects of the game (Kumari et al. 2018). This may prove to be an issue in later playtesting and will be identified by using player profiling and metrics to understand the different types of players who may only wish to explore some aspects of the crafting tree.

References

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