Deep
This week was our first week within deep dive, and my god, there is so much to do. The first thing that we began working on was our art pipeline. This was our main focus because moving forward, we wanted to minimize as little work as possible to organize and resetting our levels, assets, and design, and focus more on the actual development of these things. It was set up by our programmer so that any art assets that will need components in our game will be established by him first, and set up to work so that our artist can simply replace pieces in the blueprints as needed, with no extra input. Any pieces she replaces will then automatically replace whichever version in the level, allowing for smooth sailing as we continue this semester.
The next set of changes spawned from our design discipline review. During this, we pitched our game again to one of our other professors, and talked about what it needed and where we should go from here. Going into our meeting, we knew that we needed to add more to our game, it was just a question of how much, where, and how to go about doing it. Which is a taller order then what I am making it, but we knew that we would figure it out eventually. The first question we tackled was the players motivation and why they were doing what they were. We hashed out several ideas until it eventually came down to, and I am paraphrasing here, an evil has befallen the library, and as a subpar-misfit student, you believe that this can finally be your chance to shine by rising up and taking out this mysterious evil. This would allow us to give direction to the player as to why they are doing what they are, as well as set up a context for the world to exist within.
After this, we moved on to the main question we were dealing with: gameplay. This was our primary concern and we addressed it by discussing two things: our level design philosophy, and the systems that the powered the game. The first thing we took on was the level design. We did this because many of the games that we will be in competition with focus primarily on simple mechanics and complex level design. However, in our discussions, what we decided made those work were contextually different environments and more players and tasks for the player to do. Often times these tasks were repetitive and didn't offer much to the player in anything other then a hindrance. What made them fun was the interaction between four players and the crazy level design. Because we are working with 2 players, and don't feel incredibly interested in moving beyond that. we are in a bind compared to our competitors.
So what from a systems side could be done to change up gameplay? One thing that was brought up during our discussion was what impact the enemies being books really had? Most people use books to learn, so perhaps there is something we can do with that? What evolved from this was the idea of learning spells from the books. Whatever player eliminates a book first, gains that books individual spell such as the fire spell for the fire book. To pair this to work within our game, we are planning on setting up the levels to work in a style of phases. We had already planned out the books to work in waves so that players would be able to handle things and not run into situations that were unfair, so as a partner to these waves we added traps that can go hand in hand with the books while offering more difficulty to the waves. This gives us more flexibility in how we develop waves, and builds up strategy and things for the players to do and interact with.
Progressing the rest of the week really focused on creating many of the docs that are not necessarily engaging but are necessary. It was good to have these though, as it allowed for more introspection and creation on what can push our game farther.