First of all – an apology. Clearly I wasn’t able to get a post done at the start of the week. I was thrown off by the long weekend, and I’m still trying to get a proper rhythm going with these things…
That said, our game alpha has been submitted, and Uni doesn’t go back until early August, so there’s nothing really going on now, right?
Well, not so much.
It would be fair to say that we are not 100% happy with the game that we have built to date. While there are elements that work well, the game isn’t really … fun.
Which is not ideal.
So we are going to use the first few weeks of the break to really tear the whole thing apart and try to work out what we can do with it.
A problem that we had last semester was that we never had a lot of time to play around with our mechanics. We took a long time to get them up and running, and as a result pretty much had to build the first idea that we had, without much iteration.
Here is a little example of the alpha that we submitted:
You play as a young girl who can shift into a shadow and then interact with shadows as if they were solid. she can also change into various animal’s shadows.
Our basic problem was that we over scoped. *Cue no-one in the games industry being surprised at all*
And the result of this was that we never really got anything working particularly well.
So we’re using the break to right back to first principles.
We had a discussion with our tutor yesterday about the feedback that he had, and we realised that we really needed to pull all of the guff out and try to find the fun mechanics, then rebuild around that.
So out go the girl, the animals shadows, the shifting.
Now our game looks like this:
And the next few weeks will be rebuilding and rapid iteration.
Let’s see how that goes…