Week 1 – It Takes Three to Drive the Ship
Jerry:
I woke up from a long sleep after summer break. Sunshine went through the window drops softly on my pillow. Ripples drift along the Monongahela River, diffusing the reflection of the Entertainment Technology Center on the river.
What am I doing? The only voice echoing in my brain is “It takes three to…”. After I try to figure out what is the last half of the message, only the number “3” remains.
“Actually, we are creating an asymmetrical collaboration game across VR, PC, Mobile platforms.” Yifan Jiang, the lead programmer of the team, says to Jerry.
“Thank god, you still remember that!” says Jerry, “and now let the brainstorming begin!”
Brainstorming
Designing a collaboration for 3 players is hard. Designing an asymmetrical collaboration game for 3 different platforms? That’s rocket science.
We think about three approaches to this challenge
Path 1: Design from real-world 3-people collaboration examples
We don’t have to invent the idea of 3-people collaboration, it is happening in this world. When talking about 3 people, we are talking about the abstraction of 3 stakeholders. They can be 3 fundamental role divisions in society
Or even something more abstract:
Path 2: Design from actions that each platform support
It’s critical to find the basis of our design space. And that basis, according to Prof. Brenda Harger, is a collection of actions on our target platforms. By exploring what each platform is capable of, we can have a solid foundation for game design.
We focused on VR because it was apparently the hardest platform to design games with.
Path 3: Design From Culture
The last approach requires nothing more than the passion in a theme, a topic, a culture like “Giant Machine” or “Call of Cthulhu”. We hope the gameplay and art will naturally grow as we pick a culture that we are all passionate about.
Prototype-As-We-Design
Making a game across 3 platforms is a technical challenge itself. So we decided to start prototyping as soon as possible to verify the technical possibilities. At the same time, we want to know if our sprints-based production pipeline works. The only way to know that, is to do that.
So we decided upon the idea of “Battleship Crew”, where we will drive the ship to fight against some enemies. And we make a bold statement out there: we are going to playtest the game on Week 3 Wednesday!
And we presented that to Friday’s workshop.