Is the River Flowing on It’s Best Course?

We started the week strong with our process grade meetings. Each held individually with our advisors Christopher Klug and Brenda Bakker Hager.

These process grades gave us a chance to really asses our individual relationships with the project. Our expectations, our visions, our ideas and predictions.
Congregating after vocalizing our thoughts, we had a discussion that made us realize that we all had different visions for the project did not align. There was much conversation that was still to be had.

Challenges:
While we knew that our project was a transformational game a lot of us had different opinions on the tone and the final scope of the game. We were all had different visions with the visuals. Some preferred darker more disturbing tones, while more mild shadows and lighting, neutral palates and undersaturated tones were preferred by the others. During discussion we also realized that our views on scope and deliverables were different too.

Another challenge we had observed was that our playtest results showed apathy while going through the demo. While they are able to identify Sam, our protagonist’s source of hurt they aren’t able to empathize. A lot of our playtesting was happening at Hunt Library during playtest nights. We suspect that the reason of “no feeling” from our players was due to the environment. We got better results by sending our playtests to people and have them respond at their leisure.

We were also having trouble with scoping due to blockers with our shaders. Our hope is to use these novel shaders to properly convey the emotions of trauma, so while they are a huge part of what makes this project, they are also creating a blocker in our progress

Takeaways and Next Steps:

• Our inconsistencies in vision prompted us to hold a meeting at the end of the week to finalize our tone, visuals, scope and parameters for decision making.
• We decided to go on a darker journey and focus on trying a less trodden path with game design. Designing to authentically show the impact of trauma on a person’s memories and sense of self.
• Going dark would mean change in narrative and art, including the storyboard.
• Reaching out to experts to help with our shader blocker. Maybe have a discussion on how to proceed if the shaders are not usable.