Challenging
This week my team decided to challenge to move forward in development. But before we get to that whole mess, this past week we finished our work on our third and final prototype, Sleepy Ninja. This had been one of my personal favorites to develop, as it was my favorite of our original ideas.
Sleepy Ninja was conceptualized during a late night anime binge, specifically Naruto, an anime focusing around ninja in the briefest description possible. At the time, I was getting especially tired, and the thought came to mind "Man, this stuff would be really hard to do while you were sleepy or tired." This sent me down a rabbits hole trying to figure out how this would work in a game form. It eventually became a 2D casual stealth platformer that focused around a sleep meter. This sleep meter controls your ability to move, jump, perform actions well. The closer to awake you are the faster you run, higher you jump, the stealthier you are. This creates an interesting twist in the level design, because their then has to be more then one possible solution to even the simplest of problems because a player could be on any part of the sleep meter. Difficult to perfect, but a great challenge as to what we want to do.
In order to try and get a better idea of what the setting might be, I spent a large amount of time researching the different periods of Japanese architecture and what influenced the ideas of the period. I find that in my design, and in design in general, that we can become so focused in our own medium that we neglect to go out and research things from other mediums and the past, when that can offer some of the best inspiration to your design. So, I spent several hours reading about the historical changes that were going on, what the architecture meant at the time period and how the people felt about it, because that was able to communicate to a great deal about the people and culture we were developing in as well.
Once I had completed my research to the group and we decided from it to make a combination of the Edo and Heian periods in order to create a realistic, but still fantastical universe. With our setting in place, we began developing the levels, art, and the prototype itself. Once the prototype had been complete, we brought it before QA and had incredibly positive responses. Players couldn't get enough of the game concept and were very excited to see what more could potentially exist for the game.
The Decision
In the end, though, our decision for our game to move forward with came down to two things: Fun and Scope. Twin Stick Cloner was able to meet the Scope aspect, but the game wasn't going to be as fun to work on. This led to it being immediately scrapped by our, because if we have a choice, we should be having fun while making our game. This brought us to Spellbook Rush and Sleepy Ninja as the two possibilities for what we would move forward with as a group. We had a very health discussion about the possibilities for each game and what each could offer. In the end, it was not a question of which would be more fun, but rather which was closer to being in scope. Each has individual problems with scope, but in the end one was closer: Spellbook Rush. Both games had been successful and well loved by players who had tested them, so it eventually came down to the idea that with Spellbook Rush, while there was still risk to deal with, it would be easier to deal with then some of the problems that existed with Sleepy Ninja. From art problems to a difficult path to reach our goal, Sleepy Ninja was just not going to be feasible to do in the amount of time we had. Because of this, and the confidence we had in our game idea, we are moving forward with Spellbook Rush, and I for one, can't wait to begin real development.