Living on the Edge

        A lot of things have happened since the last update. For one, we have chosen our setting/context/art style. Our players are ghosts inhabiting an old, dilapidated mansion with a long and colorful history. Each ghost met their end within its walls and believes itself the true owner, and every month on the full moon they simultaneously grow powerful enough to manifest and fight each other and try to banish the others to their eternal rest. With this came a new iteration of our dodge mechanic, now called "phasing" or "drifting". The dodge lasts for about half a second and makes the player intangible, allowing them to pass through attacks without harm as well as other players and the walls of the environment. We're building our attacks and our levels around this mechanic with a goal of creating a very dynamic space for players to show off their personal skill and tactical decisionmaking.
        Phasing creates a lot of subtle decisions for the player to make every second of gameplay and as a result it has a strong effect on the pacing of the combat. While your phase is available you can play much more aggressively because you always have a fallback in case things go wrong. You can dodge your opponent's biggest attack without letting up your own onslaught, or you can disengage through a wall and look for a more opportune time to strike. There's a lot of applications both for aggressive close range playstyles and longer range sniping or hit and run strategies. Baiting your opponent's phase is a valuable tactic as well, because it puts them in a state of vulnerability that you can capitalize on. Phasing through a wall can be both an escape maneuver as well as a bluff, because if an opponent follows you through then you know for sure that their phase is down as well and if you turn and fight then they will have much more limited options to defend themselves. We expect proper use of the phasing mechanic to be a main determination of skill level, and hope that it'll add that extra level we need to move above and beyond button mashing into a more competitive game. So far it's testing well in terms of first impressions and fun factor with new players, and we'll be keeping a close eye on how it evolves as repeat testers become more comfortable with the system.

Week 7: A Few Good Ideas

        Our first foray into stage 3 has been centered on our art style and the theming of our game. It's going to be crucial to contextualize a lot of our complicated mechanics (the drafting system, especially) in order to make the game feel very cohesive to the player. With a strong enough theme it would also offer us a lot of affordances to make the different attacks more readable, which will be an increasing concern as we implement more later in the project. We're all in agreement that this is very important stuff, but we haven't found a style that the whole team is behind just yet.
        In terms of design, what I want most out of our art style is something the players can really latch on to, something that can engage the players immediately and hold their attention long enough for them to get a good sample of the gameplay. I feel pretty confident about how well our game will play, but I realize that it will take a few matches before players can really get the full idea. The biggest contributors to a player's first experience will be the most immediately gratifying parts, like big impressive set-pieces in the levels, flashy attacks, and a good thematic grounding for why the player is here, why they are fighting each other, and how they are doing it. I think our focus will be finding some themes and ideas that excite the kind of people in our target demographic and bringing out something cool and new.

Updates and some concrete examples to come.

Week 5-6: Concatenation

        The last few weeks have been eaten up by Stage 2, which we will be challenging tomorrow. The stage requirements are mostly paperwork, documentation, and bookkeeping, so there haven't been any exciting design upsets to speak of. Hopefully as we swerve into Stage 3 there'll be some real meaty design issues for me to talk about. Our top priority at the moment is implementing and testing our variety of "spice" mechanics for our core gameplay. We've had test sessions twice a week and so far we've learned that well, people like our game. It's based on very tried and true mechanics and our prototype has a couple pretty exciting gameplay patterns thanks to the different sets of attacks you can draft. The short range teleport, our "blink", is one of the more popular moves, as well as the scattershot, which launches large numbers of randomly moving projectiles that quickly clutter the screen. We have a lot to iron out but the initial results are promising.

         What I mean by "spice" mechanic is something to set our game apart from competitors and give it its own identity. If we executed all these core platforming and shooting mechanics flawlessly we'd have a pretty solid game, but rather unremarkable. If we want to stand out (which we do) then we have to bring something new to the table. We've been trying to make sure that the art direction we choose works well with our mechanics, and in a lot of ways the ideas we've been pitching on both sides have influenced the process of the other. We have several systems planned that we'll be putting in front of testers in the coming weeks, and we'll be trying to match these up with art tests and focus groups to try and keep a sense of cohesion in what we're making. Stage 3 is going to be the biggest part of the project with the highest amount of turnover and iteration, and I think it's going to be pretty exciting to see what makes it through the grinder.More to come in weeks yet to pass.

Week 4: One or the Other

        This week has mostly been preparation for our upcoming Milestone 1 presentation. All our deliverables and paperwork came together, but for a while we were stuck on the toughest part: deciding which prototype to move forward with into the rest of the semester. We had a lot of group meetings, a lot of discussion both with each other and our teachers, and a lot of testing. In the end we decided on our platforming combat game (the fighter/deckbuilder from previous weeks), and it's a decision I'm more or less comfortable with. I'm confident in being able to execute it well over the rest of the semester and (hopefully) the rest of the year, but it is a little disappointing. It's not a bad idea at all, but it is a safe one, which was a more important consideration for other members of my group. Personally I always skew towards the more innovative and out-there concepts, and it's a mixed blessing. You have the chance to strike something really big when you're living on the edge, but there are plenty of risks. I might have been willing to throw my semester on this project behind something risky and experimental, but not everyone was on board with that. I felt like keeping the team confident and united was more important than pursuing the other idea, so I backed down on it.
        The platforming combat game has plenty of room to work in, and I've planned a number of directions to iterate in and test over the next few weeks. I've been really enjoying the concepts our artist Liznel has been working on, and I'm excited to try to span the gap between the mechanics and the flavor on the game. I think this game will require a strong cohesion between story and mechanics in order to really excite players on the more casual side of things, who might be less interested in strategic drafting and more in beating up their friends and having fun. The biggest mechanical challenge that I'm expecting on the platforming combat game will be preventing the drafting system from feeling tacked on or gimmicky to the gameplay. Right now the clear-cut drafting phase followed by the combat feels very "game-y" and I think there's a way to make it fit more cohesively. We've talked about breaking the drafting up into stages during the match itself, sort of like a half-time bonus round, as well as an upgrade system for moves already drafted. Maybe further testing will show that players don't mind the explicit drafting stage, but we won't be able to get much data on that until we have a larger pool of moves.

Presentations await, see you in the second stage.

Week 3: Brevity

        This week we've continued to iterate on our two big ideas, and we were able to get a couple of testing sessions done with our first prototypes. The response from the testers was promising, and I think we've got something here in both of our concepts. We're swiftly approaching our first milestone and things seem to be on track. We're a little worried about potential scope issues on these games as they're both fairly asset and programming reliant (in varying amounts), so one of my goals has been iterating on the game concepts and trying to tune them down into more direct and cohesive experiences. Given the short development cycle we have for this project I feel like it's very important that we focus our design(s) as much as possible. Every piece of our game will have to be important, because we just won't have resources to devote to unimportant or unrewarding systems or assets.
        Simplicity in game design is something I really value. It's a bit of a contradiction with the sorts of games I like as a player, which include a lot of really dense and complicated strategy games like Magic: the Gathering and DotA, but as a developer it's one of my top priorities. I really admire the recently released game Divekick for this sort of simplicity. It's a fighting game where you have, in addition to movement, two controls: jumping, and performing a diving kick whilst jumping. Pretty simple; you basically understand the whole game by reading its title. The beauty of it is how deep the gameplay actually is. Any direct hit from a kick will instantly KO your character, so it becomes a very careful dance of jumping and attacking as both players try to set up a solid hit while preventing their opponent from doing the same. You have to keep your movements unpredictable and always be thinking ahead of your opponent, but on the other hand it's just as rewarding to play as a button-mashing mess. Maybe less rewarding on a competitive level but it sure is fun to be flying all over the place, looking for that one big hit. Divekick is very easy to comprehend and explain, but it holds a surprising amount of depth in such simple mechanics. A lot of it is created by the players themselves and how they interact with the systems and compete with each other, and that's the core of a competitive game. It's the full experience of an intense, neck and neck fighting match distilled down to the most fun moment. It skips all the incremental build up present in most fighting games and goes straight for the part everyone will remember: landing an earth-shattering kick on your friend's face.
        That's the kind of elegance of intent and design that I'm looking for in both of our concepts. We'll get a lot further focusing on and polishing one resonant experience than if we try to tackle something complicated and dependent on many systems. The Mole game seems to have a pretty clear hook that the testers responded to, that being outsmarting your friends/enemies in an interactive environment, and now I'm looking at what directions I can push that in to emphasize this fun. Even our rough prototype is getting a solid amount of excitement from testers laying down traps and executing really clutch surprise maneuvers, and I want to maximize that sort of second-to-second tactical and strategic engagement as well as the big water cooler moments when a plan comes together and someone gets wrecked. The fighting and deckbuilding game is a little more complicated because of how the hook is a little divorced from the "actual" gameplay. We're looking at ways to combine these two parts and make it feel more like a single game than two distinct stages, both in a mechanical and a conceptual way. Some questions still remain in what players will find most compelling about it once the drafting system has been implemented in the prototype, but the only way to find out is to keep sitting people in front of it.

See y'all in a week.

Week 1-2: Searching for the Bottom Line

        This week marks the first official sprint of Team Swanboats' capstone project, on which I am the lead designer. To keep my introduction brief, I'll be posting about our weekly goals and progress as well as my own design process. Should be a pretty exciting year!

        In this first stage of the project most of what we're doing is throwing around ideas, discussing them, and seeing what works. Eventually we boiled down our ideas into two solid concepts: a fighting/deckbuilding game and a mole person simulator. The fighting/deckbuilding game resembles a 2D fighting game like Super Smash Brothers, except instead of choosing an existing character each player assembles a fighter from several moves that they choose from a shared pool. The move pool is randomized each match and no move can be picked more than once, so the players have to be flexible and build their "kit" of attacks and defenses around what their opponents are picking. That is, if they want to get a competitive advantage. Alternatively they can just grab whatever they think the coolest moves from the pool are and mash those together, and we're planning on catering to both of these styles of play. The mole person sim, working title Underminers, is another 2D game similar to the Worms series. Each player controls a single mole in a 2D "ant farm" slice of dirt, and has a few tools to dig around and set up traps. Each map has a number of hazards like lava, natural gas, and skeletons, and the goal is to kill the other players by tricking them into one of these hazards. You can set up a trap door that drops an enemy mole into a river, or you can route another mole's tunnels into an active volcano and flood them out with lava. The goal is to have a wide variety of options in an environment that the players can freely interact with.

        One thing I really enjoy in games is a sense of discovery and exploration for the player. It helps a lot with replayability, but its also a great tool to keep the player engaged in an otherwise long-winded or complicated design. Unloading a great deal of complexity on a player is usually met with confusion and disinterest, especially when its all rules. If the player isn't having fun or is engaged in some way then they're more likely to drop it and take their time elsewhere. A great example of this is how tutorials in games have evolved over the last decade or two. In System Shock 2 (1999), the tutorial stage of the game takes up a solid half hour of vaguely playable walks between voice recordings, each describing some mechanic, system, or control to the player. It's a lot to handle, and to me it felt like a barrage of information of varying importance. In Bioshock: Infinite (2013), the newest game by the same studio, the tutorial stage of the game is both longer and more interactive. It gradually explains mechanics to the player one at a time with longer stretches in between to let the player explore their environment and the mechanics at their disposal. The connection between the tutorial and the rest of the game in Bioshock: Infinite is seamless and keeps the player receptive to new gameplay later on, while the finality of the training mission at the beginning of System Shock 2 almost makes it seem like "here you go, that's it, that's everything that's in this game now go play it".

        The principles of a good tutorial aren't terribly important to us yet, as we're still very deeply in an experimental and iterative stage in the project, but you can see how these ideas of discovery and engagement relate to our designs. If we tried to explain everything about the fighting/deckbuilding game in one go we'd probably just be making a movie, and the mechanics of Underminers are so subjective and dependent on context that explaining the "right" way to ambush and outsmart your friends is basically pointless. I've been working on designing these games in such a way that the player can take them at their own pace and gradually achieve a level of mastery beyond what an info-dump tutorial could teach. The fighting/deckbuilding game has the players interacting with progressively smaller groups of abilities, from a large pool down to the handful of attacks they select for an individual match. The player gets to practice and become familiar with a small subset of the game each time they play, and it eventually adds up as the player learns more about the unique dynamics of certain groups of attacks and how to play with or against them. Underminers on the other hand drops the player into an environment with a simple goal and simple tools, and lets them figure out a plan on their own. New players will likely use the same tactics repeatedly, but as they get more experience with the tools they can branch out into more complicated traps and snares when they feel comfortable with it. The game is open no matter what your speed of acquisition is, and it means the route from one strategy to the next is limited only by your own skill and knowledge rather than an invisible design wall. Hopefully we'll be able to run with this in whichever idea pans out and create an experience both accessible to every player and as deep as they'd like it.

See you again next week, folks