This week’s first task was to render 94% of last week’s content invalid, choosing three ideas and abandoning the other 47. I suppose it’s more like 90%, since we did end up combining a few of the ideas into the prototypes that are moving forward, but at this point it’s gotten pretty easy to say goodbye to that sort of thing. (I’d say there’s always the next project, but at this point in my college career it may be too late. Oh well.) As excited as we’ve been for some time about the music game, it ended up petering out a by the time we had to make the choice. Turns out we just liked a lot of cool rhythm games and didn’t actually have our own take on it.
We do have some pretty interesting stuff that we’re taking forward though. The Minishock game is continuing (for now), despite insistence from professors that it seemed “really cool but nigh impossible”. We’re going to try and get some fun power mechanics working and see where it goes. Right now, the powers we’re working with are an energy redistribution power (that we’ve nicknamed “absorbatron”) and one that lets the player instantly swap the position of two objects. The idea is that we want to give the player as many choices as possible to overcome the situations they’re presented with. We’ve all been playing some “Shock” games/immersive sims in our free time (System Shock, Bioshock, Dishonored), and we’ve sort of realized that a lot of that is going to come from the situations themselves. It’s a tricky problem to solve.
Side note, I have a music teacher who went to school with Warren Spector, which means he got me in touch with him freshman year, and I had a short conversation with him about game design and being a scared freshman. I realized that having that sort of connection to the guy who basically invented the immersive sim genre, I might want to reach out and see if he had anything to say. I’ve sent him a short email asking him how he’d approach this challenge and hey, maybe I’ll get advice from the guy who made Deus Ex.
The game that I’ve spent the most time with this week is the dire management game, which I’m temporarily calling “Enforcers”. The gameplay loop as it stands is giving the player a set of missions to choose from which have different personnel and equipment requirements, and letting them choose which ones they want to complete. They can also buy personnel and equipment, and level up the personnel by sending them on missions, turning them into different units that fit different requirements. It’s interesting that one can do so much work on a game so it looks almost done, then realize there’s one final step where all the real work has been hiding, which in this case is setting the rewards for the missions. It’s that final piece that’ll make or break the balance of the game.
The biggest problem that I’ve been having with this game is the “hook”. Most systems in it as they stand don’t do anything innovative or different from other management games. The one I’ve come up with for now is what I call “investigations”. Certain missions give the player “intel” that is themed with one of three symbols. They can sell it for a large amount of cash, or they can wait and try to collect a large amount of it with the same symbol. Once they have enough, they can launch an investigation, which lets them either start hunting down a specific crime boss, or contact them and start doing jobs for them on the side (woo moral choice). I’m hoping that this mechanic will add a level of intrigue that gets players invested in a long term goal that matches up to a cool narrative theme.
Overall, I think this week has gone pretty well. We’ve had some very productive meetings, and I’m really starting to see the team dynamic take shape. I’m confident that’s going to be what carries us through this. We’re getting very good at communicating our intentions and ideas to each other, and any of these games are necessitate we continue to use and improve that skill.