In this Post I will be doing a post-mortem on my recent project Mamaro, discussing the things i've learnt and the good and bad.
Artistic Statement
Mamaro is game designed around the elements of trust, power and responsibility. You take control of the once warlike Robot Mamaro that struggles to keep its sanity by protecting a little girl who acts as Mamaro’s “Humanity”. Mamaro the game is designed to have players think before they act. Where many games of today have no risk involved in being more aggressive, Mamaro emphasises consequences of actions, whether it be good or bad and trusting one’s own decisions in order to keep balance.
Much like Jenova Chen’s “Journey”, “Flow “and “Flower “as well as Upper One Games “Never Alone” the game focuses on creating a more enriching experience for the player. We do this by facilitating the player to form a bond with Lucy, who trusts the players choices in order to keep her safe. Along with games such as Never Alone and Journey, inspiration for the design elements of Mamaro came from other artistic mediums such as: the painting “Broadway Boogie Woogie” by Piet Mondrian.
Much like Jenova Chen’s “Journey”, “Flow “and “Flower “as well as Upper One Games “Never Alone” the game focuses on creating a more enriching experience for the player. We do this by facilitating the player to form a bond with Lucy, who trusts the players choices in order to keep her safe. Along with games such as Never Alone and Journey, inspiration for the design elements of Mamaro came from other artistic mediums such as: the painting “Broadway Boogie Woogie” by Piet Mondrian.
Using the painting as more of a conceptual inspiration, I explored connections and bonds as the basis for Mamaro’s mechanics where one affects and forms into another. As our brief was to create a game that revolved around the elements of trust, using the composition of the Boogie Woogie’s solid and connective structured helped to create the mechanics within the game, Lucy’s (the martyr) fate is tied directly with the player’s actions, no action they take isn’t without consequence. Boogie Woogie’s color pallet also played a large part in setting up the main protagonist’s identity as well as following with the mechanics prompt of a haunting like nature. Red and Blue represent in most cases a Good/Evil persona and is something we encompass within Mamaro’s story, this gives the opportunity develop deeper themes that allow for more though provoking experience.
And musical inspiration: Arvo Part - Tabula Rasa
We used its overall soft, subtle and haunting tone as the basis for Mamaro’s dystopian theme and tone. Keeping with more serious and deeper tone for the games story helps to further encompass Mamaro’s inner conflict-like nature, struggling with old tendencies of war and aggression while trying to keep Lucy safe is a fine balance to keep and Tubula Rasa’s melody helped to focus on this inner calamity.
Beginning as a games developer my design intentions were vastly different to what they are today, being exposed to games such as World of Warcraft, DoTa and more competitive games was what drove my vision and design intents when working within a project. Visual arts is another passion, traditional, digital any visual form I always enjoy creating, which is something I always try and utilize within my games. Jehovah Chen was my first real inspiration to create a truly whole experience rather than focusing solely on the visual aesthetics, bringing together my two passions in much the same way as games such as “Shadow of the Colossus” or “Ico” where the game in its entirety is a work of art. My design intent being inspired by great works has led me to create games that are not only fun but a truly wonderful experience.
Mamaro the game was is my first attempt at creating a game with a different games design approach, taking steps at refining my vision of creating games with an enriching experience in much the same way “Ico” or “Kingdom Hearts” has done for me.
Beginning as a games developer my design intentions were vastly different to what they are today, being exposed to games such as World of Warcraft, DoTa and more competitive games was what drove my vision and design intents when working within a project. Visual arts is another passion, traditional, digital any visual form I always enjoy creating, which is something I always try and utilize within my games. Jehovah Chen was my first real inspiration to create a truly whole experience rather than focusing solely on the visual aesthetics, bringing together my two passions in much the same way as games such as “Shadow of the Colossus” or “Ico” where the game in its entirety is a work of art. My design intent being inspired by great works has led me to create games that are not only fun but a truly wonderful experience.
Mamaro the game was is my first attempt at creating a game with a different games design approach, taking steps at refining my vision of creating games with an enriching experience in much the same way “Ico” or “Kingdom Hearts” has done for me.
Mamaro : The Good, The Bad
The Brief
Mamaro was created following a brief on Trust, using artistic prompts mentioned in my artist statement to create the Games mechanics as well as the overall theme. During the beginning stages of Mamaro's concept the idea of trust focused around the protection of the little girl lost in an unknown world but this idea slowly evolved and elements of combat and stat mitigation were introduced. As the development process proceeded the game's concept turned to Co-op split screen game, with one player relying on another to achieve an end term goal but as the end term goal didn't follow along the basis of trust the concept finally shifted back to a compilation of both worlds but only as single player.
The final concept came in the form of players taking control of a giant robot, whose end term goal is to protect a stranded girl from harm. Splitting attention between combat, stat mitigation and providing solid goals of protection and offensives capabilities caused Mamaro to miss the overall design brief of trust. These elements caused a lot of unforeseen complexities and more time was spent in developing and fixing combat and state mitigation and neglected to meet the core brief of trust in which these abilities would affect the little girl. Meeting the brief would require revaluation on players actions, diluting combat to more primitive actions such as simple punches or blocks or ultimately removing combat completely and focus more on steps players take throughout Mamaro.
The final concept came in the form of players taking control of a giant robot, whose end term goal is to protect a stranded girl from harm. Splitting attention between combat, stat mitigation and providing solid goals of protection and offensives capabilities caused Mamaro to miss the overall design brief of trust. These elements caused a lot of unforeseen complexities and more time was spent in developing and fixing combat and state mitigation and neglected to meet the core brief of trust in which these abilities would affect the little girl. Meeting the brief would require revaluation on players actions, diluting combat to more primitive actions such as simple punches or blocks or ultimately removing combat completely and focus more on steps players take throughout Mamaro.
The Good
Solid game concept
Mamaro's conceptual design from beginning and throughout the iterations had very strong ground, with documentation being planned thoroughly and updated as we iterated the design. Everybody understood what the game was about and everybody understood what needed to done. Alot of intention was put towards the overall planning of Mamaro with everyone adding in feedback and contributing to project. Documentation in terms of audio assets will have to be looked over to see what can be improved to better communicate between disciplines what the project requires.
Strong Communication
With thorough documentation, came about strong communication among team members, using programs such as Skype, Facebook as well as meetings and studio parties (working together in the same room) were able to effectively keep everyone up to-date. Some translations can still be worked on to better communicate between disciplines and fortifying what assets need to be created.
The Bad
Motivation
due to constant re evaluation of Mamaro's design a lot of energy of the game was spent in the overall planning of the game and as the final design was set in stone a lot of motivation for the game had already been spent just on documentation and designing. As Mamaro was delving into deeper themes with very strong emotional context, dropping of motivation begun to bled into the overall spirit of game. Having a game with strong emotion without the creative emotion behind it leads to the games essence becoming very lackluster where the mindsight for development becomes more about getting things done rather than getting things to feel right.
Late development
Along with motivational energy being spent, the longer creative process left a lot of attention being focused on finalising the documentation rather than the actual game itself. Certain milestones were not met in time and this lead to many things taking longer to create which also contributed to motivational drop.
Over Complexities
This could be attributed to late design, if development of mechanics were done at an earlier stage then complexe mechanics would have been tweaked better and contributed to the games core goal and action and reaction. Another solution would have been the dilution of certain mechanics whether the development was started on time or not, more focus on action and reaction would have lead to following along with both the nature of the game as well as the design brief.
Things going wrong
One large issue was the oversight of complications, where the game was planned out without taking into account large issues arising and these lead to again to further development core game play loop instead of polishing the loop instead. Future planning will include stages where things can potentially go wrong and have enough time to deal with these issues when they arise.
Summary
Mamaro's design in the beginning was very strong, and this lead to solid plan on how we would approach developing the game. Documentation for mamaro was very well thought out and will be something ill be continuing to use in future project as a template on what needs to be discussed and what information needs to be conveyed. Learning to finalise design at an early stage would help prevent a loss of motivation for creating the actual project as well as leave time for polish as well as resolve issues. Although many of the mechanics of Mamaro were more complex than needed, Late development overall lead to these complexities not having the finalize polish needed to contribute to the Core Game experience. Future planning would involve designing the game to have more flexibility in case certain aspects need to be removed without leading to the games core being affected. Mechanics dedicated to the actual core of the game, in this case lucy and the cause and effect mechanics would need more priority in order to meet future briefs.