It is almost Time. Halves is just next week, and so a substantial portion of our week has been dedicated towards preparing our outlines and presentation rough drafts. However, we have simultaneously been experimenting with our third prototype, and so I don’t have to bore you by dedicating this week’s blog post to presentation preparation.
So, what have we been making?
This week, we’ve been exploring a horror direction. Of course, we’re only allotting ourselves a week for this, as we have done before, but we ended up with something that I think would be quite worthwhile to explore on the Space Bridge in the future.
Here’s the general idea: An Observation Duty-like game on the Space Bridge. Simple enough. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Observation Duty is a series of indie horror games that have become popular as of late (especially in the genre of ‘indie horror games played by famous Let’s Play Youtubers, read: Markiplier’). In these games, the player is given control over a collection of security cameras that cover the breadth of some interesting location (e.g., a hotel, an amusement park, a laboratory), which they can cycle through, giving them a view of one area at a time. As time passes, the areas which they are not currently looking at will change in subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) ways, and they must point out what has changed in order to correct it. If too many changes build up without being identified, then the player loses. The goal for the player is to survive a set period of time without losing. Think of it like a horror spot-the-difference.
The advantages that we hoped to leverage in this kind of game were two-fold: we wanted to try and create and experience that many people could participate in as spectators, even if they don’t have direct control over the consoles (anyone can participate by observing and communicating. There’s a reason these games are so popular for Let’s Play Youtubers), and we wanted to try and make a game that utilizes the Space Bridge without overexerting itself attempting to make each screen and console control layout equally important for gameplay.
Of all of the prototypes that we could playtest and refine, I personally (me, Derek), would be interested in exploring this one. The art style we’ve landed on here is particularly striking on the large monitors of the Space Bridge. There’s something particularly intriguing there, the way it all looks in the framing of the whole console. It’s difficult to articulate, but standing at a physical console while you stare at a giant screen before you, flanked on other side by additional views of the outside world… It is an experience that hints at a whole other dimension of possibility for the Space Bridge.
There’s more that can be said about the way we have set up controls and such for this experience, however given our time constraints and the simultaneous preparation for Halves, much of the interesting work that we’ve done here has been on the visual presentation on the Space Bridge itself. If we were to continue exploring this, we would definitely want to play around with the control scheme some more.
(Right now, the six buttons flanking the center control console are used to change the security camera view, and the touchscreen presents options to identify what has changed, e.g., when the computer monitors in a room become staticky the player would press the button that says “reboot systems”. It’s not the most engaging, but it serves its function for this prototype).
Anyways, next week is Halves. Hopefully that goes well!
Over and out,
The Intergalactic Buttoneers