From where we left off last week, our immediate goal for this week was to gain more clarity on what this concept looks like, play wise. The idea of a persistent, changing, environment within this greater creature is compelling, but so many questions remained on what that actually looks like when played.
To that end, our first goal design-wise was to land on some design pillars, and identify the core of our game. From our work last week, we had a collection of concepts, but no real organization to how they were related and tied together. We migrated to Miro, an online whiteboard, in order to visually start organizing things.
After a couple sessions, we landed on 6 design pillars that covered all of our most important concepts, knowing that eventually we would have to remove or consolidate some pillars in the near future. The pillars are as follows:
- Connection with a creature greater than yourself
- Visually and emotionally immersed in the world
- Alive (literally) environments that evolve over time
- Players and environment which mutually effect each other
- Choosing the right tools and approach for the job
- People contribute their own specialties to achieve a greater purpose
Here is a little more insight on each pillar
Pillar 1: We were really intrigued by this idea of an asymmetrical relationship, and scenarios such as if the player didn’t know they lived inside of a massive beast.
Pillar 2: One thing that we all liked were games with little, or non-intrusive UI. This also would enable our beautiful and intriguing environments to shine.
Pillar 3: We wanted our environments to be strange, but feel believably lived in. The environment should react to your actions, and perhaps the actions of previous player also impacted your own environment like in a legacy game. We also played with ideas such as having our environment go through seasons.
Pillar 4: One thing that we wanted to break away from is the idea of naive problem solving. Not only are there player repercussions for the environment, but this aspect of society interest should play a key factor as well. This leads to an interesting trifecta of environmental, societal, and player/beast interests which needs to be managed.
Pillar 5: This idea of responsive environment really gains value from the idea of choice, and that the player gets to choose how the environment eventually responds. In addition, we liked this idea of planning out your approach to the problem, and picking the respective equipment that will help you in approach.
Pillar 6: The idea of social is really strong, especially in a game about interconnection (between you, the environment, and society). What’s really compelling about multiplayer is the idea of bringing a different set of tools to help friends on their own journey, drawing upon activities like backpacking as an inspiration.
For the core essence of our game, we felt that this idea of symbiosis and coexistence is the heart of our game, pulling everything together. We also wrote a quick elevator pitch summarizing our concept in a succinct way.
Following the definition of these pillars, we were a little fuzzy on our next step so we consulted with Jesse Schell on our concept and process. The meeting was incredibly helpful, and gave us direction to work towards. In particular, Jesse latched onto pillar 4 from a gameplay perspective. There were games that involved purifying the environment such as Keyna: Bridge of Spirits, and there were games that were about balancing environmental elements such as Frostpunk, but there aren’t many games that change the environment in a very procedural way. Jesse challenged us to think about the feedback loop. On a large scale, how does the environment reflect good or bad changes made by the player? On a smaller scale, how does the player immediately know when they’ve taken an action that might alter their environment down the line, and how do they know whether for better or for worse? Jesse also helped contextualize our ecosystem problem, namely that the team would have to invent an entirely new ecosystem for our game. To get us started thinking, he gave us some anecdotes on the origin of oil deposits, as well as the dependence animal organs on habits such as sleep. Some other helpful advice we received was to prioritize what was fundamental to our game. Our multiplayer pillar was not nearly as fundamental to this idea of symbiosis and would complicate the design of our other pillars significantly, so we decided to bench that design pillar.
We also met with our advisor Chris Klug to discuss our pillars. Compared to Jesse, Chris really latched onto the narrative potential of our concept. In particular this interaction with the beast provided the opportunity for a number of really juicy moments, such as the moment the player first realizes they are inside of another creature, or the moment where the player and creature establishes first communication and how their relationship could change as the story progressed. In some sense, the story beats wrote themselves, as well as the potential for evolving gameplay as the story shifted from phase to phase. Another thing that Chris really pushed us on was the visualization of this world. What exactly would a player be looking at when they were inside of this beast? What is the scale of the player relative to the beast that they are in?
One thing was shared between the Chris and Jesse faculty meetings, which was their interest in the raw concept. The fact that both faculty bought into the concept as interesting was very reassuring that the team was on the right track. That being said, just because the project shows promise doesn’t mean that everything would automatically turn out well. The next major milestone for the team would be 1/4s, coming on Friday of week 3, in which the goal is to get the rest of the faculty to buy into the concept just as Chris and Jesse have.