continuing on from last week's blog, and and the shoulders of giants team progress further in creating that Mamaro game, and as noted from the previous blog emotioneering and fun and dynamic experience for the player.
Creating the Feel
From last weeks playtest, one thing already become clear, its alot harder to create and sustain a level of emotion that we are after, and create a the world and how the player interacts with. Of Course more steps can be taken to tackle unforeseen hurdles but we were still able to gather some feedback and take steps to overcome these hurdles.
And this week be and the team strived to develop the mechanisms that facilitate the martyr mechanics where players become reluctant to be aggressive and instead try to protect lucy more, balancing risk and reward and ultimately rewarding the player not just with an end term goal but progressively as they chug along the game.
Flow
As Jenova Chen was a huge influence to my current design direction I decided to start doing some research into earlier games that he created, one game named flow explored the basics principles ironically of flow with a games design aspect. Based around DDA (Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment) where players where varying skill levels can enjoy the game at their own pace without taking away from the experience.
It became clear after playing flow for a bit and seeing how flower was created it was pretty clear what his initial design direction was, and is a aspect I hope to refine and base my future projects on.
Lights out
As we begin to Wrap up Mamaro, creating a deep player experience revolving around the aspect of trust I hope to implant and refine the idea of creating mechanics that revolve around different, this year I have learnt so much and have found my initial game design slowly changing as i become more influenced and more experienced by amazing games.
When Approach is to completely rethink my design of idea of lights out, a concept I feel is very strong, but my previous design approach was flawed in the sense that I still created around look instead of Feel and so the design of the game and what the player will experience was rethought.
When thing that still stuck around from older approaches was RPG style Grand Epic Questy Explory like nature, I made the levels huge, I made players explore, but completely missed the design intent that I was trying to capture.
When Approach is to completely rethink my design of idea of lights out, a concept I feel is very strong, but my previous design approach was flawed in the sense that I still created around look instead of Feel and so the design of the game and what the player will experience was rethought.
When thing that still stuck around from older approaches was RPG style Grand Epic Questy Explory like nature, I made the levels huge, I made players explore, but completely missed the design intent that I was trying to capture.
Simply put, its about a boy, trying to be brave in the face of his fear (Personified), The game would have players battling the "monster" aided by courage, this if redone properly would have nearly an instance arena like environment.
Redesigned concept
Players would start within their room, the monster gradually appearing but players unable to fight back, before he can "Eat/defeat" the child some sort of block will fend him off but not for long.
This leaves players understanding the power roles, understanding there end term goal but this does not fit into a more DDA style approach that I am very fond of and so this brings into concept the area based idea, players will found themselves trapped within this veiled shadow like area , protected only by a dimmed light "Nightlight" with darkness pooling underneath their feet, the light keeps the dark away but only sparsely and players avoid the cracks in between the light.
The monster himself will be the main antagonist trying his level best to bring players into the shadow being repelled only by this light as players either make a dash out from this shadow place or ultimately fending off the monster till dawn.
Redesigned concept
Players would start within their room, the monster gradually appearing but players unable to fight back, before he can "Eat/defeat" the child some sort of block will fend him off but not for long.
This leaves players understanding the power roles, understanding there end term goal but this does not fit into a more DDA style approach that I am very fond of and so this brings into concept the area based idea, players will found themselves trapped within this veiled shadow like area , protected only by a dimmed light "Nightlight" with darkness pooling underneath their feet, the light keeps the dark away but only sparsely and players avoid the cracks in between the light.
The monster himself will be the main antagonist trying his level best to bring players into the shadow being repelled only by this light as players either make a dash out from this shadow place or ultimately fending off the monster till dawn.