This week is a difficult but fruitful week for us. We have constructive discussions on the directions of the game. The challenge about designing our game is about balancing the entertaining and transformational weight. Inspired by “keep talking and nobody explodes, we decide to bring in the cooperation and especially the asymmetric information cooperation as key gameplay component to increase the entertaining side of the game. At the same time, we decide to blend in the real-world footages bit into the game (with a gameflow like gameplay – footages – gameplay – footages etc).
On Wednesday, we had our quarter walkaround, where professors listen to our presentations and provide feedbacks. Through their feedbacks, we identified several potential flaws in our design, like overdesign, throughput for the room, etc.
With the help of feedbacks from professors, we have made several major decisions on the game:
- Compliment 3d art with real-world footages to increase credibility
- The cooperation between players in VR and immersive room has asymmetric information
- Focus on Amazon indigenous cultures
Now with a clear direction being set down, we decided to have 2 designers mainly focusing on the gameplay design, whilst engineers and UI/UX designers can start working on prototyping the basics of the game.
As we finally started to step in actual development, we are both excited and nervous about the potential technical challenges. How to merge the documentary in a 3D game? How to use shader to imitate the Amazon rainforest environment? How to view a 2D video clip in VR space? We will start answering those questions from week 4.