Week 5 started out on a rough foot. Coming into our instructor meeting, we were confident having done a lot of development in the direction of player stories, backstory, and scenery exploration. However, our instructors were very concerned at the level of detail in the work the team presented. The biggest concern that having such detail would become a burden when the team would need to pivot, and would lead to dissonance between team members. As such, we were strongly encouraged (implicitly) to return to the concept of verbs and be more deliberate in the picking of them.
Design
Following the instructor meeting, the design team regrouped back to the design pillars and associated verbs. The goal was to re-identify how verbs are related not only to our design pillar, but also to each other. This would help the team have something new to bring to our design meeting with Chris and would give us something else to work off of.
Coming into that actual design meeting, Chris reviewed the new set of verbs in conjunction with the game that our team was pitching. His first piece of feedback was “This in not an action adventure game”. Action games have time pressure and the threat of death, which wasn’t reflected in the verbs that were chosen. This didn’t mean that the verbs were bad, but rather the team had to step back and re-frame the way they thought about the game.
Over all, the design team walked out of the meeting with lots of takeaways. Topics included consistency with technology level and setting, how deeply should we be involved with linguistics and what we expect of the player, and cognitively, what type of game is this for the player to experience? For the rest of the week, the design team sent a list of verbs every day clarifying the main gameplay loop. This allowed for rapid, guided iterations on the verbs that would be used as the foundation for our gameplay design.
In addition, the design team also met with Brenda Harger for assistance with the narrative aspects of our pitch. During quarters, our team got feedback that lore aside, there was not real reason to care about our world. In other words, it lacked clear conflict and motivation for the potential player. In general, Brenda recommended for the team to start off from a basic improv story structure for simplicity. From there, we would have to figure out stuff like how do people get into a brand new science fiction world, and how to go about justifying our narrative decisions.
Art
Continuing off of the previous week, the directive for the art team was to continue with concept art generation of more stomach locations. The goal in there iterations was to provide as much variety as possible while staying within the space as described by the designers.
While Yifan and Harry were still tasked with environmental exploration, Joy begun work on investigating the player character and what they should look like both visually and stylistically.
