PlaytestingDuring playtesting I was hoping to get feedback about the TRUST in the game, however players didn't even make it to a point in the game where it was introduced. The puzzle mechanics were broken, the camera was extremely non-friendly, the character movement was game breakingly buggy and the game as a whole was appropriately called 'Asset Soup'. Things wrong:
I put on my leader hat and assigned rolls to the team according to importance and time needed to fix it. After all the system work was delegated it was my job to redesign the whole world... again. I wanted to focus on the tutorial area and insure players wanted to progress through the game. In the playtest most people quit in the middle of the tutorial due to the unfriendly nature of the experience. I also needed to make it feel 'not like Journey'. A whole new worldI feel that Journey has somewhat ruined any games that are set in a desert. Sure i'm deriving inspiration from the game, but the fact that even having sand is a "Journey Ripoff" really annoys me. Also since we don't have animators the only road we could go down was that of the cloth people, I admit, this does relate to Journey's character design. So. How to make a game feel like journey but not look like it? I went with a suggestion I got, and it worked. Night Time. But surely just by making it nigh time wont fix my problem? That's why I made sure right from the beginning of the game the players are presented with Aztec style objects to make them know that this is no 'Journey'. TeachingThis was a big problem since every player needed to be told how to do things by the devs instead of having the game teach them. I imagined these little followers of the gods telling you controls, so I made a little 'teaching totem' that would tell you things based on your proximity. Mechanics OverviewThe mechanics in the game had to be based off of a prompt, I chose 'Praising'. They also had to be related to trust in someway. The praising mechanic comes from the praising of the shrines which keep you safe from the fog.
Mechanics:
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What is this BLOG about?This is basically my thoughts and whatnot as I improve as a Developer. Archives
June 2017
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