We’ve had a bit of a rough week. A few of the group have gone missing over the semester break, and the rest of us have been trying to come up with revisions, re-imaginings, or reinterpretations of our idea.
We had a meeting with the group members who were present and tried to do some rapid iteration, working through ideas to try to find a new ‘nug’ that we could build the game around.
We were in a position that the game we had was A) not fun, B) not a challenge, and C) didn’t really have any fantastic central mechanics.
Our use of shadow casting was interesting, and we heard consistent feedback that the shadows were cool and interesting. But the only thing that we ever managed to do with the shadows was to build a bridge over a gap to allow the player to ‘run as fast as they could to get to the next obstacle’.
Another element that never really go to the point of being interesting or fun was the use of various animal shadows. It took us a llooooooooonnnngggg time to get these up and running. And in the end, the shadows didn’t really do anything beyond change the pace of the player’s movement, or change their jump height. And once you did have the shadows, there wasn’t any reason to return to using the girl’s shadow.
And finally there was the use of the girl and a Victorian mansion as the setting. The art style was never really unified or particularly exciting. It was very ‘busy’ without adding anything to the game-play or informing the player in any particular way.
So – we got medieval. We cut away absolutely everything that we deemed unnecessary.
In the end, all we were left with was the shadow casting mechanic.
So we had a session of trying to work out what we could do with those shadows, and what sort of gameplay we would end up with.
Following that, we went away and tried to put together some prototypes showing the new game-play.
And here are some examples of what we came up with:
It’s fair to say that these are nowhere near complete or polished, but we do have some playable prototypes, which is something that it took us a long time to get to with the previous game.
So overall, I’m feeling a little more hopeful at the moment. Fortunately, I can temper that by recalling that we have VERY LITTLE TIME TO MAKE THIS INTO A GAME.
So the next few weeks is going to involve us hitting our straps in a big way to get a proper alpha ready to go for open day at the end of July.