This week, a big focus has been on collaborative processes between team members. We’re reaching a point where a lot of our conceptions about the game are coming together, which forces us to challenge some of those conceptions if they conflict with someone else’s. Fortunately, if that process is successful, it ultimately results in a more cohesive game, which I think is and will be the case with the work that we’ve put in this week.

Mike has started implementing the designs for the different powers onto the mask as they’ll be seen in the game. His initial conceptions of the designs were very heavily art-deco themed. This was excellent for visual consistency throughout the rest of the game, but there was some concern between Kai and myself that the new designs were not visually distinct from each other, and were almost conforming with the art deco too much, and might not be seen as a distinct system, and just as another piece of the environment. I talked it out with Mike specifically in person as I thought the reasoning for his changes were legitimate, but was concerned for the reasons stated above.

We ended up reaching a pretty solid compromise. The angled lines that I had conceived for the projection power ended up being adapted into a sunburst pattern, only using acute angles and with all lines originating from one source, in trapezoidal shapes. The absorb design ended up looking like the complex designs that one pictures most often for art deco (very visible on the Great Gatsby poster) with thick lines, lots of intersections, and tactful use of curved lines. The parkour powers are done entirely with thin, curved lines, mostly circles and overlapping shapes, which implies a fluid and fast moving experience. It was a really excellent experience for both of us to develop this sort of aesthetic compromise, more helpful I think than the design experience itself for both of us.

I also talked to Kate a lot about narrative this week. We’ve got a pretty solid foundation that we’ve been working with a while, but I definitely was able to make some very good fixes to the overall structure by talking to Kate nonetheless. There were quite a few points where I realized an issue as I was describing it, whether it was an explanation for why the hotel has remained undiscovered, or the pieces that make a character’s backstory compelling and consistent. Kate’s biggest suggestion is to focus on the elements of the narrative that pertain directly to the player, like their motivation for being there, how they found the space, and their individual motivations over the course of the game. Ideally, I’d like to tie those elements into the backstory, if perhaps not directly.

Another major shift for our narrative is taking away the audio logs that we’d planned. They are a major time commitment to do, and frankly I’m not sure they’re going to serve the greater game as a whole. One of our big selling points is on our narrative and its delivery. If most of that delivery is characters talking at you, I somehow seriously doubt that’s going to come off as unique, or engage players enough for them to remember it. I’m going to try approaching it from a different angle, and actually try to communicate as much as possible through environmental storytelling. I’ve started layout out an asset list for the sorts of things that we could use that from broken pieces of the environment to bloodstains, to posters talking about events that transpired in the hotel. Mike’s very excited to work on them, and it’s going to be really cool to collaborate between our disciplines like this.

The other element we can use for narrative is mask text. It’s heavily implied that the player’s mask is alive. It can communicate with the player by writing out messages on walls and environment, which means we can use it to communicate specific messages about things we want to call the player’s attention to. Kate’s said that making the player look at something is much better than making them listen, and all you’ll usually need is a sentence. Hopefully this’ll be a good place for me to put my narrative skills to the test and make something really efficient.

Another important piece of work this week was making the floor plan. I had a really excellent talk with Kai where we determined the importance of knowing the complete dimensions of the hotel, which I did go through and work out. We now know how tall each floor is, the rough horizontal dimensions of the building, and how large an individual hotel room is. This will make level design a much more cohesive process, especially considering the broken up pieces that I will be constructing as individual rooms.