The goal for this week was try to clarify this idea of a vertical slice, and use it as a tool to envision what this experience of gameplay would look like. From our 1/4s feedback, many of the faculty were asking questions that we were already asking ourselves pertaining to clarity of concept and action, which was an indicator the project was on the right track. From this point, both design and art continued their respective exploration.
Design
To further iteration with the game play, the design team opted to leverage the experience of faculty and meet as much as they could in order to gain different perspectives on how to proceed. The first person consulted was our faculty advisor, Chris Klug. Chris provided a lot of context for how to think about our game, such as “what type of gameplay bucket does our game fit in”, and “where do we imagine players fitting in on Bartle’s taxonomy”. He then advised figuring out our core verbs, how they relate to this bucket, and then iterating upon them. Another thing that was brought up was this hierarchy of game components. At the top sat the genre, which outlines the player experience. Under that were verbs, which are broad actions the player did in this game. Of course, the verbs had to respect the genre and be aligned with the player experience. For instance, an action game has to have the threat of death or failure reflected in its verbs. Under the verbs were problems, which the players needed to solve in the process of acting out the verb. These problems should be self-evident to the player, meaning the player understands at a high level what needs to be done to solve these problems, even if they don’t know the exact steps. These steps themselves are the next broken down component. Players do know, or are able to figure out how to perform each step, which cumulatively leads to solving the problem. These steps often come in odd numbers, so players can set landmarks for themselves such has “halfway done”. Finally comes the actions the player takes in order to perform these steps. These actions need to be specific, but also should embody the spirit of the verbs that the players are acting out on a higher level. At the end of the meeting, Chris advised us to figure out our game from the bottom up, creating a simple problem statement with steps, and actions that would be taken to complete each step.
The design team also met with Dave Culyba. Dave proposed the idea of player stories, which are moments which completely describe what the player sees, hears, and experiences in one moment of gameplay. Taking a scenario that exists and doing this helps highlight everything that is unknown, and being forced to question the design helps force thought about how different pieces of the scenario fit together. It also forced the team to visualize what exactly this scene looked like, and what it means to experience it.
Finally, the design team also met with Jesse Schell. This meeting in particular was more specific. With one of the concepts being environmental change, the team wanted to ask Jesse on systems and changing environments. Upon presenting this question, one thing that Jesse noted that systems games were their own entire beast. The way systems games handled success was often the reaching of some sort of threshold, and thus are less strongly tied to story aspects. That means that our game would have to choose between leaning hard into systems, or leaning hard into story, and be clear about which the player would engage with. From there, Jesse gave examples of similar games that fell into those categories. Fantastic Voyage is a game about fixing the human body from within, and leans into systems without being too “plate spinner-y”. Meanwhile, Mass Effect is a series that has strong narrative moments, and the cumulative decisions result in a final world state. Other potentially similar games included Pikmin, which features the player having indirect control over their environment.
Following the faculty’s advice, the design team set out to design in the directions suggested by faculty. The team specified verbs from design pillars, and used those verbs to create a problem statement with steps. In this scenario, the team focused on the problem of this ulcer in the host whale’s stomach lining, which the player had to close before it became dangerous. From there, the team did a player story, illustrating every step on the way of healing this wound. After the first internal player story iteration, the team also presented the player story to artists, asking for their insights and questions on the player story. A similar approach was taken with regards to narrative as well, using the format of question-based design to fill out key details and backstories.
Art
Coming out of quarters, the art team also looked towards faculty expertise in terms of steps needed to progress. The team met with Moshe Mahler on Wednesday to go over feedback and get insight on how to proceed. Mo emphasized the most important thing at this stage is to prototype drawings in order to better understand the visual style. To that end, visual mismatch between the different artists is a fairly minimal concern, as long as each artist is using their own specialty to do their own discovery. That being said, it would be important for the team to explain how the different pieces fit together. In order to have effective discovery, each art piece should be specific in the main concept that it is trying to visualize. Ricardo echoed similar advice, mentioning that the team should focus on the details already established as a foundation for the artistic exploration.
Yifan was in charge of the landscapes and color studies, making illustrations to help convey the shape, feel, and color of different spaces. From the initial storyboard and player stories from the design team, the art team was able to nail down 4 different environments that they wanted to explore. The first exploration was done of the player’s starting village, a developing town built above the space whale’s stomach acid level.
Meanwhile, Harry was in charge of detailed explorations. In the context of the art team’s work flow, this meant the investigation of detailed structures that could potentially fit into Yifan’s environments and act as points of interest. A lot of the detailed exploration was focused on the concept of how the strange environment of the inside stomach lining inter played with the society building on top of it. A number of structures were drafted around the concept of society building off of these blood vessel support, and when society harvested food for from whale and used it to nurture the blood vessels, they would grow stronger and allow society to build off of them more.
Finally, Joy was in charge of the character and musical explorations. Where the character details were still being worked out by the design team, Joy drafted some background loops from limited instrumentation that could encapsulate the feel of traversing the unknown landscape.
Additionally, based on the player stories from the design team, Joy was also able to make a couple iterations of the theme for the player’s hometown, which was described as having “developing technology”.